BRAVO to the Usher Hall.
They pulled out the stops and secured a near-capacity house for the one-off appearance of Yuri Temirkanov and the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra on Thursday night. And the band and conductor, in turn, pulled out their own stops with a set of vintage performances.
Temirkanov has mellowed. I've not seen him smiling so much at the orchestra in over 20 years. He is still a fantastic mixture of austere conductor and showman, but the music on Thursday was serious business. Temirkanov's version of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony absolutely hit the nail on the head in its tempos, pacing and weighting. So many conductors today play silly what-nots with this piece. Temirkanov and his great orchestra got it dead-right in its Russian-ness and its Haydnesque spirit. The symphony is a miraculously light piece; but, as this outfit demonstrated comprehensively, lightweight it is not.
I've been a fan of pianist Dmitri Alexeev for more than 20 years; and his barnstorming performance of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto swept the crowd before it. But I cannot pretend not to have noticed, the last few times I have heard him, and again on Thursday, less precision and more splashiness creeping into his playing.
The heart of the night, however, was the shattering performance of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, incredibly well gauged in the first movement's explosion into violence, the Mahlerian "dig" of the Scherzo, the haunting intensity of the slow movement, and the gripping concentration of its relentless coda. What a show. What a band, with an inimitable blend of sophistication and intensity. And what a conductor in this magic man Temirkanov.
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