GRAMOPHONE Review: Russian Spectacular (Balakirev, Borodin & Mussorgsky) – Singapore Symphony Chorus & Orchestra/Shui

Surely here was an opportunity to stray a little from the well-trodden path and offer perhaps Mussorgsky’s startling original version of Night on the Bare Mountain instead of Rimsky-Korsakov’s popular sanitisation? And given the hugely imaginative title (not) Russian Spectacular avoid yet another turn around Mussorgsky picture gallery when the brush strokes are Ravel’s not his.

But, of course, this disc is plainly all about showing what the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and their Conductor Laureate Lan Shui can do and how good BIS can make it all sound. Very well, is the answer. But success in this music – especially the centrepiece Pictures at an Exhibition – is all about characterisation or, to put it another way, as much about what is not on the page as what is – and I have to say that conductor Shui’s direction displays a fatal lack personality. The clarity is there, clean as a whistle, the playing is sound, even immaculate – but where is the music’s ‘inner life’, the reason those notes are there in the first place?

Rimsky’s Night on the Bare Mountain – for there is precious little of the original Mussorgsky’s stark innovation remaining – is one of those not-a-hair-out-of-place readings, somewhat pedestrian and absolutely without risk. Granted Rimsky took the satanic debauchery right out of this particular witches sabbath but a conductor and orchestra worth their salt can still generate excitement as we hurtle (?) towards the last midnight.

With Ravel’s rightly celebrated orchestration of Mussorgsky’s piano original Pictures at an Exhibition much of the characterisation is there for the taking – but it must be sharply observed, it must have profile and vitality, a personality between and beyond the notes. Here we stand before the first picture – the malevolent ‘Gnomus’ – and it’s flat on the canvas: four-square phrasing and an absence of intrigue and tension. The troubadour at ‘The Old Castle’ wouldn’t beguile any maiden, distressed or otherwise, with this lethargic serenade; with ‘Bydlo’ there is heavy and there is plodding; with ‘Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle’ the jabbering solo trumpet is so content to show how well he plays the tricky solo that it’s hard to imagine his nervous deference to the portly Goldenberg. And how can ‘Baba-Yaga’ sound quite so unexciting?

The best of this frankly unremarkable disc comes with Lyapunov’s feisty orchestration of Balakirev’s notoriously difficult piano piece Islamey. At last – impulse – and some sense of imperative. And that’s carried through into the ubiquitous Polovtsian Dances which come with a well-drilled but somewhat impassive chorus – which may or may not be appropriate for whipping slave dancers into a frenzy.