Chief Conductor John Storgårds returned to the rostrum for this barnstormer of a Saturday night at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, flanking Dvořák’s Cello Concerto with works of searing intensity by Shostakovich.
The giddiness and darkness of the evening’s double Shostakovich gave the concerto a much-heightened sense of lyricism and richness, helped in no small part by Anastasia Kobekina’s highly expressive, rubato-heavy approach to the music. There was no shortage of Romantic flair in her willingness to pull the musical line around, though she also played with huge sensitivity to the orchestra around her, often linked in eye contact. The most tender moments of the concerto – the soloist’s recap of the first movement’s second theme and the latter parts of the slow movement come to mind – were handled with exquisite delicacy.
The slow movement was imbued in turn with both vulnerability and warmth, before a finale which was full of fiery energy. The orchestra responded with a great deal of attractive playing, memorably from horn and clarinet soloists in the first movement (the latter barely murmured in volume), celli in the second and leader Zoë Beyers in the finale. Storgårds, while happy to afford Kobekina ample artistic licence, meticulously paced the drama of the first movement and allowed the second a striking sense of spaciousness. A sparkling account of Galliarda by Vladimir Kobekin (the soloist’s father), backed by Paul Patrick’s virtuosic tambourine accompaniment, made for one of the best encores I have heard.
At the top of the bill, Shostakovich’s Festive Overture had opened proceedings with riotous hijinks. That same energy would later be applied to the second and fourth movements of the same composer’s Tenth Symphony, but here it was the anguish and bleakness of this darkest of symphonies which left the deepest mark. Storgårds maintained relatively forward-looking tempos for the long introduction to the first movement, the music flowing along while finding space for some heartbreakingly lyrical clarinet solos. Happily for such a long movement, the extended crescendos and escalations of intensity were again superbly paced, reaching an impassioned climax before retreating into the shadows again. The pianissimo lines for viola and cello in the coda, topped by some admirably controlled soft piccolo solos, felt utterly cold and empty.
The second movement – commonly taken to be a portrait of Stalin – was a terrifying whirl of fear and hatred, galloping along at a heady pace with mostly well-maintained ensemble. I was particularly struck by Storgårds’ decision to proceed to the third movement with barely a pause for the audience to exhale collectively. This state-mandated sense of "move along, nothing to see here", straight into the apparent banalities of the third movement without any chance to draw breath, never mind grieve, added enormously to the power of the second. The series of "Elmira" horn calls were later handled with richly varied character and immaculate intonation, before the music dissolved into darkness again amid the flutes’ teardrops in the last pages.
The slow introduction to the finale saw bassoonist Roberto Giaccaglia pour his heart out, before erupting into a rowdy allegro. There might have been room for some loosening of the tempo in order to underline the movement’s climax, where the D-S-C-H motif is proclaimed with maximal force, though in the coda the same motif was positively screamed out by the horns. The last minutes seemed to gather pace like a runaway train, the sudden riotous appearance of E major gleefully suggesting the composer dancing on Stalin’s grave as the music hurtled towards the buffers. Don’t miss the Radio 3 broadcast on 8 December.
