If you know your Old Testament, you’ll be familiar with the picture painted there of God. Richard Dawkins describes this figure as “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction”. Why? Because of his tendency to fly off the handle and smite all and sundry, though that characterisation needs to be tempered with a lot of qualification. For all such dramatic implications I was drawn to the title of Sofia Gubaidulina’s work The Wrath of God, a reworking of part of an earlier oratorio On Love and Hate, certainly an arresting token for any piece of contemporary music. Premiered in Vienna in June 2020, it is indeed aptly titled: Gubaidulina, encouraged by Shostakovich, and like him a victim of musical censorship who had to earn her living by writing film music, knows how to strike terror into the hearts of human beings with an apocalyptic vision of divine rage.
Anna Rakitina, a late replacement for Alexander Soddy with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, wasn’t quite prepared to give the piece its head. She had a keen awareness of sonority: hushed violins set against soft tuba, plaintive horn floating above low strings, the Shostakovich-like use of the side drum, the celebratory close sounding like something out of Russian Orthodox liturgy, complete with festive trumpets and tubular bells. Yet the opening collective snarls from Wagner tubas and horns could have been delivered with even greater ferocity, and divine wrath elsewhere was only just hinted at. A lot of the writing sounds almost Brucknerian in the passages for unison strings; such hymnic qualities needed rather warmer shaping.
We are used to interpreters drawing out the inherent depth and darkness in Rachmaninov’s music. This applies equally to his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, rich and resonant with its Dies irae plainchant motif. So it was a novel experience to hear Lise de la Salle emphasising Chopinesque qualities of grace, charm and elegance. She doesn’t pound out the octaves in virtuosic fashion but makes them whirl like pieces of highly engineered machinery. A lot of the time it was the feathery daintiness of her playing that commanded attention, her fingers merely stroking the keys, her velvety touch quietly sensuous, Variation 18 emerging simply and softly without any sentimentality. She found a good deal of skittishness elsewhere in the score, infusing the middle set of variations with carnival-like jollity. Colour was always applied judiciously with no broad brushstrokes. No walk on the wild side either, and that was the missing element for me. No doom and gloom, no risk-taking, no edge-of-the-seat excitement. Certainly a lot of Apollo in the mix, but not enough Dionysus. By contrast, there were plenty of Attic characteristics on display in her Schubert encore.
Rakitina took an austere view of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 4 in F minor. She presented the composer as a moody introspective, weighed down not just by the cares of the world but all his own forebodings of Fate. Conducting from memory, she took her time over all four movements, conjuring up images of bleak northern skies and greatcoats buttoned up against an icy chill. Internal balances were scrupulously maintained, the resplendent horns repeatedly offset by the trumpets and trombones, the textures often revealing a chamber-like delicacy, dynamic levels close to a whisper. One consequence was that tension sagged. Though there was a touch of fire and brimstone to the con fuoco marking of the Finale, there was little to make one quake in one’s boots. Take out most of the sentiment in this symphony and you remove the quality that makes Tchaikovsky’s music instantly special.
