Unexpected developments can sometimes have a positive edge. The withdrawal of the scheduled conductor from this concert by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which in recent years has built up an enviable reputation for some of the most unconventional and stimulating of programmes, enabled re-acquaintance with the music of the Ukrainian composer Valentyn Silvestrov, who turns 85 later this year. The LPO performed his Third Symphony in September 2017; now it was the turn of the Fourth, conducted by Jukka-Pekka Saraste, who has championed and recorded this particular work.
Given recent events, it is impossible to separate any music by Silvestrov from its immediate political significance. This is the man who was expelled from the Ukrainian Union of Composers for two years in the 1970s for his refusal to conform. Consistently outspoken, in 2014 he decried the political face of Russia for being “entirely covered in excrement”. Every note of this 25-minute work for strings and brass therefore had special resonance.
In a short address before the concert Saraste drew a link between this piece and the concluding symphony by Sibelius, declaring that both signalled a national “will to survive”. For me, both symphonies in these interpretations exhibited a further quality: they represent filmic music at its best, painting landscapes of utter desolation. In his treatment of Silvestrov’s symphony, Saraste never allowed the flow to stall, even where the slowly disintegrating fabric of the musical argument is entrusted to handfuls of front desk string players. The sense of awaking to a post-apocalyptic world was magnificently conveyed by the LPO, the touches of Mahlerian anguish from the brass accentuating the qualities of a threnody, the recurrent figurations for the lower strings, taut and agitated, heightening a sense of foreboding in a lost world.
Apollonian fields of calm beckoned in the evening’s concerto, Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 25 in C major, in which Richard Goode displayed the elegance and awareness of style for which he is justly famed, the gentle cascades of notes in the concluding Allegretto caressing the ear with their clarity and evenness. Communicatively speaking he was at his best in the slow movement, where the lower dynamic levels and interplay between him, the woodwind and horns allowed the individual textures to sparkle. Earlier, I was less persuaded by Saraste’s tendency to force the issue, the Allegro of the opening movement completely displacing the maestoso marking, and the orchestral forces often too assertive in their dialogues with the soloist.
Saraste, conducting from memory, had a very decided view of how he wanted Sibelius’ First Symphony to go. From the very brisk start, giving the solo clarinet no time to establish a mood of half-light wintriness, and with a razor-sharp cutting edge to the strings, this was a case of the elements speaking powerfully. For stretches of the Finale I felt as though I had been placed in front of a vast Expressionist canvas with an accompanying nightmare of sounds: the seething strings, pounding timpani, brass that constantly snapped, yelled and thundered, cymbal crashes that were minatory rather than celebratory, and an icy harp far distant from the celestial gates of heaven. Not much evidence of nationalist ardour here; instead, pent-up fury and frustration, the collective voice of defiance chilling the bone to the marrow.
Nobody should ever think that Sibelius was a cosy composer. However, repeated sledgehammer blows are not always more effective than rapier thrusts. In many ways this was a very modern approach, laying bare the structural elements with granitic force. If only we had been granted those moments of repose, those opportunities for reflection, especially in the slow movement.
About our star ratings