The name of the Czech Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra might not sound familiar. They originate from the Ostrava Symphony Orchestra founded in 1954, and familiar to record collectors on Supraphon and other labels. Daniel Raiskin, directing this concert in London’s Cadogan Hall, is Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the JPO.
How better to open than with music from Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen? It was enterprising of Raiskin to devise this seven-minute ‘Prelude and Pantomime’ from the start of the opera, describing it “as a teaser to Janáček’s opera, not a full suite or anything like that”. It serves its purpose well, instantly evocative of that work’s enchantment with vixen, cricket, grasshopper, mosquito and frog. It’s only fault is that with such idiomatic Janáček playing one wanted the opera house curtain to rise on that magical woodland.
Instead we heard a concert staple in Bruch’s Violin Concerto no. 1 in G minor when one might have expected something from the JPO’s substantial 20th-century repertoire. But there was considerable compensation in Jennifer Pike’s superlative violin playing, captivating in tone and line. It is some artist who can take a warhorse as familiar as this and sound as if she has just discovered the score and wants to share its delights with her audience. There was no exaggeration in her phrasing, or anything but the most subtle rubato, playing her solos quite straight but fresh and pure in sound. Tempi were traditionally steady for the first two movements, with a captivating inwardness achieved in the Adagio. The dancing finale brought an enthusiastic reception, and an encore of one of Dvořák’s short pieces for two violins and viola, so involving the first violin and first viola of the orchestra.
Violin concertos can have the effect in larger halls (and from some seats) of seeing the violin being played rather than truly hearing it. Pike’s sound here was very clear and present, an ideal balance available in the Cadogan Hall’s very lively acoustic when the conductor takes great care with the orchestral dynamics, as Raiskin did here. Alas he was not so scrupulous when he no longer had to look after a soloist, and a generally very good account of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony was often marred by climaxes so loud that even my preferred seat at the top of the hall, furthest from the platform, could not protect me from the onslaught. Shostakovich is partly at fault, for he wrote to be heard in the Grand Hall in St Petersburg with its high ceiling and 1500 seats. Transfer his Tenth to Cadogan Hall and he becomes a noisy brute, especially when his numerous players barely fit on to the platform.
But that apart, this was an absorbing and musical account of a work that can hardly be heard as pure music anymore, rather than a transcription of life for artists in Soviet Russia under Stalin. The opening movement might be the composer’s finest in all his symphonies, with its tight coherence and cumulative tension. Ideally that requires a slightly swifter tempo than Raiskin chose, and his 25-minute duration was at the outer edge of the ideal range, contributing to an almost hour-long account of a piece for which the score suggests 50 minutes. The initial string passage was sluggish but the piece really gets going 70 bars in with a long and eloquent clarinet solo, very well played by Principal Clarinet Daniel Svoboda. From there on all was well right up to the loud affirmation of the composer’s D-S-C-H motto at the climax of the finale, and into the celebratory coda.
