Any concert featuring Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto will draw a crowd, and this one was no different. When the performance includes a soloist the calibre of the fabulously gifted Seong-Jin Cho, a conductor with the cool charisma of Santtu-Matias Rouvali and an orchestra whose enviable credentials are those of the Philharmonia, there would be little excuse not to be part of that crowd. It was a conclusion embraced by the audience that made up a full house at the Royal Festival Hall, and that conclusion was rewarded with a performance wreathed in passion, glamour and sophistication. It really was that good.
The concerto, like the other works on the programme, is suffused with elements of Russia’s vast array of folk and popular music. In this piece, those elements are highly polished and smartened up for appearance in polite society, as one may witness in the slow movement. Cho and his collaborators performed the ravishing theme as it might appear at a high-class cabaret: suave and tasteful. The vignette of the solo cello was conversational, reminiscent of movie stars in the days of black and white canoodling in close-up. Critics and musicologists have long wondered why the splendid opening theme disappears after its magnificent introduction. Having heard Cho’s performance, my theory is that it goes backstage, changes into a completely different costume and emerges as the equally gorgeous tune in the finale. In its new garb it was equipped to join in the high-kicking routine which brought down the house.
In Shostakovich’s sprawling Symphony no.11 in G minor, “The Year 1905” the vernacular elements speak with testimonial candour. Composed to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the events that lit a fuse under the Romanov dynasty, the work has naked passion and raw emotion coursing through its veins. Rouvali and his collaborators crafted a superb performance which brought those forces to the surface; the scene at the Winter Palace was haunted, the depiction of the violence visceral, the In Memoriam draped in pathos, the Tocsin rang out with defiance at the last. The playing of the gargantuan orchestra was excellent in all departments; commitment could not be made of sterner stuff. If I single out the strings, it is because so much of what they did was exposed to the elements and watching the fingers of the cellists and bassists was mesmerising. Rouvali didn’t let the emotion spill over into sentimentality or bombast – the mark of a true Shostakovian.
Some of the audience departed before the symphony, either to avoid it or to run ahead of the storm making its way up from the West Country. Either way, before leaving, they heard a finely-etched presentation of Borodin’s little gem In the Steppes of Central Asia. In this piece, the vernacular material is both Russian and Oriental, evidence of Tsarist imperialist adventures and reflective of the composer’s mixed ethnic origins. The woodwind solos were tender and expressive, the brass majestic, as a caravan and its military escort traversed the Silk Road. Those early-leavers missed Cho’s delightful encore, a beautifully phrased reading of “October” (naturally) from Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons.
