GRAMOPHONE Review: Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition / Khachaturian Spartacus Suite, Etc. – Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Petrenko
This is one of those discs which commands respect (this conductor is pretty much always a safe investment) without setting the world on fire. I kept waiting for, anticipating, moments in all of these pieces when Petrenko would slip into his top gear and raise the stakes, ratchet up the excitement. Instead, here he is home from home with a series of glossy postcards from the Motherland and very much in cruise mode.
Kabalevsky’s Colas Breugnon Overture – Russia’s answer to Bernstein’s Candide Overture – zips by, its cheeky syncopated kick-back in the rhythm and rather more ‘serious’ big tune efficiently playing off each other – but leaving us wondering, perhaps, if pushing the basic tempo and screwing the tension just a tad more might have made all the difference. That is very much the feeling I take away from this truncated suite from the Bolshoi’s muscular and perennially popular epic Spartacus. The big Adagio for hero and heroine now has nautical associations, of course (The Onedin Line made Khachaturian what he always wanted to be, an international superstar) but that’s not to detract from the splendour of the tune even if the big ground-swelling climax is here less thrilling for the reticence of the trumpets.
Perhaps that is in part due to the sound picture which certainly honours the open acoustic of Liverpool’s handsome Philharmonic Hall but lacks the ‘immediacy’ I personally welcome in music like this. Khachaturian’s most brashly scored numbers – like the bacchanalian close of the ‘Variation of Aegina and Bacchanalia’ and the triumphal finale – tend to swim in this acoustic and one misses the keenness, the clarity, the impact, of brass and percussion, not least trumpets again in the rowdy peroration of ‘Spartacus’ Victory’.
Things sound sharper with the tighter ensemble and jazz combo feel of Schedrin’s audacious Concerto for Orchestra No 1 ‘Naughty Limericks’. The inspiration may lie with folk tunes but the effect is most definitely ‘looney toons’. It’s kind of Till Eulenspiegel on heat and Petrenko totally ‘gets’ the irony of its prankster nature. Probably the best thing on the disc.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Petrenko’s account of the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures is that it feels mindful of the piano original in the way that is inflected and shaped. Picture for picture it’s hard to fault playing or characterisation on a leisurely stroll round the gallery – but then again do any of these aural images really leap out at you? Yes and no. The big panoply of bells at the close of the ‘Great Gate of Kiev’ perhaps – suddenly overwhelming – but like ‘Bydlo’, the ox-cart, it’s a performance that clings sturdily to the middle of the road.
Lovely idea to conclude with Timothy Jackson’s orchestral transcription of the wistful Rachmaninov song ‘Zdes’ khorosho’. Plainly it makes Petrenko’s heart sing.
