Despite his low-key demeanour on the podium during Wednesday evening’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra concert – an occasional hop in the air notwithstanding – Kirill Karabits’ intentions were evidently to have fun, and not take anything too seriously. That may have seemed at odds with the choice of repertoire, focusing on two interpretations of Romeo and Juliet, yet it turned out to be otherwise.
Apropos: Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet music does many things, but demonstrably shies away from real tragedy in favour of brooding, waxing lyrical and punching hard. Karabits maximised each of these, eliciting ferocious contrasts from the CBSO. The work’s opening outbursts were white hot, akin to cries of agony with numbed aftermaths, while the famous main theme conveyed palpable dread and malevolence. Light, diaphanous delicacy coloured the lyrical music, at times turning intimate though Karabits (like Prokofiev) was reluctant to labour the point, keen to move on toward either tumult or play.
Yet, if not tragedy, then there was certainly solemnity. The Death of Tybalt returned to the intensity we heard at first, passing from a romping rush of blurred momentum to punishing sharp blows, ending up in a Berlioz-like grotesque processional. The same atmosphere permeated the final movement, Romeo at Juliet’s Tomb, Karabits responding to the violins’ urge to flow and sing by making them trudge, due to the leaden, fatalistic weight dragging from below.
Boris Lyatoshynsky’s take on the same story was odd in many ways. First, because it’s a world away from the progressive, often fantastical symphonies he composed throughout the 20th century; dating from 1955, its weirdly conservative language suggests it could have been written 50 years earlier. Second, because where Prokofiev leans away from tragedy, Lyatoshynsky evidently felt this to be, if not exactly irrelevant, then certainly not the ultimate point of the story.
Karabits very effectively emphasised the air of mystery and menace in Juliet’s Garden, darkening the music’s gentle intimacy, ratcheted up in the ensuing tempestuous clamour of Romeo and Tybalt’s Duel. This reached a high point in the fifth movement, Juliet is Taken to the Burial Chamber which, though fraught and dark, was characterised by a beautifully articulated, profound tone of melancholy from the CBSO strings. This was subsequently swept aside by the brass in a veritable maelstrom, as if they heralded absolute doom. The undeniable power of these central movements nonetheless seemed undermined by the overall emphasis on a lighter tone. Not only the simple jaunt of Carnival Waltz or the faux-Tudor Pavane with its attractive countermelodies passed around the winds, both of which, narratively-speaking, come before things turn bad. Yet for Lyatoshynsky there appeared to be something transcendent about the teenagers’ terrible demise, ending up in an Apotheosis that strangely suggested nothing but bliss.
The one work on the programme that seemed entirely certain of, and stayed true to, its fundamental character was Glière’s Concerto for Coloratura Soprano, the highlight of the evening. This featured Jennifer France in a dazzling wordless performance where she seemed to become the physical embodiment of a particularly highly-charged theremin. Through the opening Andante she kept things cool, the colourful but emotionally neutral mouthpiece in music heavily redolent of Rachmaninov, packed full of aural calories. However, in the answering Allegro she hovered and swooped over the orchestra’s waltzing, so cheerful in her rapid staccato passages she came to resemble a ‘Queen of the Day’. This was France, the CBSO and Karabits all at their best, caught up in a mixture of rapture and opulence, overflowing with personality, without the slightest pretence that tragedy had ever really been on anyone’s mind.
