Revisiting an Iconic Moment in the Creepy Classical Canon
Over the course of thirteen years here, you would think that at some point, a recording of Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition would have made an appearance. No dice. The Chelsea Symphony's performance of that staple of the horror-classical canon got a big thumbs-up...but that was in January of 2016.
Fast forward to 2021: the Chelsea Symphony's beloved executive director has moved on and the group are as imperiled as any other performing arts organization outside the free world. But there is a very straightforward, energetic 2018 live recording at Spotify by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gianandrea Noseda (both featured here earlier this month) which has plenty of creepy moments.
For those unfamiliar with the suite, the composer wrote it as a requiem for his painter friend Victor Hartmann, inspired by a posthumous retrospective of his work. It's a wildly successful attempt to bring those paintings to life within the context of a leisurely, pensive gallery tour. In reality, Moussorgsky's memory of several of the pictures on display was either fuzzy, or he deliberately gave them a much creepier interpretation. The original suite is for solo piano; Maurice Ravel orchestrated it in 1922. That's what the orchestra are working with here.
The creepiness doesn't start immediately, Noseda leading the listener into the gallery via a firmly reverential stroll. Ravel's genius is in highlighting every available bit of phantasmagoria. Case in point: the twinkling second segment, The Gnome, which Noseda picks up boisterously at the end.
Fueled by the low brass and deliciously fluttery, ghostly strings, this broodingly waltzing take of The Old Castle is a keeper for anybody's Halloween party playlist. Those cattle in the pasture? Definitely up to no good, beneath an increasingly stormy sky.
The Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks is on the goofy, cartoonish side of Halloween music. But Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle, the two Jews out for a Shabbat stroll, are definitely keeping an eye out for trouble. Interestingly, Noseda's interpretation of the catacomb scene is much louder and emphatic – and less haunting – than other conductors usually portray it. Maybe that choice was to set up the distant ominousness of the land of the dead – and then a rise to the bellicose menace of Baba Yaga's Hut afterward.
The rest of the suite is relatively more lighthearted: proto-ragtime Tuileries, an anxious Limoges market scene and a dynamically rich, stately portrait of the (completely fictitious) Great Gate of Kiev.
This album opens with a similarly dynamic, persistently restless concert recording of Tschaikovsky's Symphony No. 4. The fateful angst and moody balletesque variations of the first movement, moments of gorgeous bittersweetness and torment of the second, unexpectedly carnivalesque touches in the third and boisterous swirl in the conclusion all testify to how sensitively Noseda and the orchestra approach it.
October 28, 2021 Posted by delarue | classical music, Music, music, concert, review, Reviews	| album review, classical music, GIANANDREA NOSEDA, london symphony orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra Moussorgsky Pictures, London Symphony Orchestra Moussorgsky Pictures review, London Symphony Orchestra review, London Symphony Orchestra Tschaikovsky 4, London Symphony Orchestra Tschaikovsky 4 review, moussorgsky, Moussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition, Music, music review, noir music, tschaikovsky | Leave a comment
An Iconic Horror Film For the Ears
Here's one of the alltime great horror movies for the ears. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No. 4 in 1936, when he first earned the wrath of Josef Stalin for daring to create interesting and relevant music that didn't glorify the genocidal Soviet regime.
Censorship and totalitarianism existed long before the lockdown, the needle of death, Facebook and Google. The Leningrad Symphony Orchestra was pressured not to premiere the symphony, which wouldn't see the light of day until 1961. The composer reputedly called it his favorite.
As political satire, it's one of the most withering pieces of music ever written. It's a mashup of Stravinsky, Tschaikovsky, Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King and Schoenberg, but more venomously political than anything any of those composers ever wrote. There's a spellbinding live recording by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, streaming at Spotify, that you should hear if you can handle savagely troubled music right now.
This particular album is taken from two concerts at the Barbican in November 2018. Noseda's dynamics are vast and dramatic to the extreme, as they should be. Whether explosive, or shuddering with horror, or ruthlessly parodying Stalin's campy pageantry, the orchestra are a force of nature.
The first movement comes in with a shriek, a pulsing post-Sacre du Printemps dance of death and all kinds of foreshadowing of how Shostakovich would expand on this kind of phantasmagoria, far more politically. All the strongman themes in Shostakovich's symphonies, from the third on, are phony: he never lets a tyrant, whether Stalin or Krushchev, off the hook.
Coy cartoons suddenly appear livesize and lethal. This is a cautionary tale, the composer telling us not to take our eye off the ball, or else. A rite of the dead of winter, intertwined with terrified individual voices, rises to a vicious crescendo. The first of many references to Anitra's Dance, the Grieg theme, appears. Concertmaster Roman Sinovic and bassoonist Rachel Gough become plaintive and persistent witnesses to history.
Movement two is nothing less than an indictment, a sometimes ghostly, pervasively anxious waltz wafting in and out, the ruthlessness of the regime baring its fangs to a terrorized citizenry. The concluding third movement begins too casual to be true, as the orchestra calmly allude to another macabre Russian classic, Moussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. The chase scene early on doesn't have quite the horror of the KGB pursuit theme in Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8, but it's close.
The ensemble offer a twisted parody of a Germanic minuet as a spitball at the entitled Russian collaborator classes, Noseda getting maximum cynical gossipy fervor out of the strings. Stormtroopers gather and wreak havoc, the orchestra building a devastatingly phantasmagorical parody of Tschaikovsky's Nutcracker. Clashes of ideologies, musical and otherwise, grow more combatively surreal. The seemingly ineluctable, gruesome march out doesn't get to fade down without a series of accusatory ghosts.
As with all of Shostakovich, there are innumerable other details that could take up ten more pages to chronicle: buckle up for this carnival of dead souls. The London Symphony Orchestra's ongoing series of live albums comprise some incredible performances and this might be the very best of recent years.
October 1, 2021 Posted by delarue | classical music, Music, music, concert, review, Reviews	| album review, classical music, GIANANDREA NOSEDA, grieg, london symphony orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra review, London Symphony Orchestra Shostakovich 4, London Symphony Orchestra Shostakovich 4 review, Music, music review, noir music, Rachel Gough, Roman Sinovic, schoenberg, shostakovich, Shostakovich Symphony 4, stravinsky, tschaikovsky | Leave a comment
Savagely Brilliant Shostakovich Symphonies From the London Symphony Orchestra
In a time when global tyranny and repression have reached levels of terror not seen since the Middle Ages, it makes sense to revisit two great antifascist works from a composer who narrowly managed to survive under one of the world's most evil regimes. Only Dmitri Shostakovich's popularity saved him from the fate so many of his friends suffered under Stalin. Fortuituously, maestro Ginandrea Noseda and the London Symphony Orchestra have just released a live album of two completely different but equally relevant Shostakovich symphonies, No. 9 and No. 10, streaming at Spotify. The former is from 2018, the latter from performances at the Barbican in January and February of 2020, just a few weeks before music there was banned by the Boris Johnson regime.
During his lifetime, Shostakovich explained away the savage irony, caricatures and stricken horror in his music as reflecting on the evil of the Tsarist regime, even though it was clear that he was taking shots at Stalin and then Krushchev. Symphony No. 9 is an oddball, the only one of its kind in the composer's repertoire. It's a goofy little piece of music whose sarcasm is almost completely deadpan. It's impossible to imagine a more dispassionate celebration.
Written ostensibly in tribute to the Soviet victory over the Nazis, the blithe little flourishes of the first movement seem to ask, "So we aren't going to find out if life under Hitler would be any better than it was under Stalin? It couldn't be any worse." Ultimately, history would validate that gruesome premise. Noseda leads the orchestra through a very individualistic interpretation, muting the turbulent undercurrent and practically turning it into a concerto for flute and violin.
The conductor takes the second movement slowly, letting the brooding reflection of Juliana Koch's oboe speak for the weariness of millions of Russians. This depleted, exhausted waltz really drags. Then in the third movement Noseda really picks up the phony pageantry, a familiar trope in the Shostakovich playbook: trumpeter Philip Cobb's facsimile of a martial Russian victory riff is a hoot.
But it doesn't last. Timothy Jones' sotto-voce, lightly vibrato-laden horn brings back the sullen atmosphere in movement four. The sober oboe introduction to the conclusion foreshadows a familiar, troubled hook from Symphony No. 10. The coda is appropriately rote, a whole nation bustling through the motions.
No. 10 might be the greatest symphony ever written: Noseda and the ensemble go deep into its innumerable layers for gravitas and historical impact. Grounded in the low strings, the vast expanse of pain and anguish in the first movement is visceral, a requiem for the victims of Stalin's reign of terror. Noseda's choice to mute the flickers of hope against hope, as a pulsing sway grows more and more harrowing, is an apt template for the rest of the recording.
The furtive chase scene of the second movement gains coldly sleek momentum as it morphs into a danse macabre: holocausts throughout history are always carefully orchestrated. Movement three, in contrast, seems especially restrained in its most desolate moments, setting up the iconic, eerily syncopated, Scheherezade-like theme at the center.. Individually voices of mourning rise over a grim hush in the fourth movement: that brief, bubbly respite may only be a coded message to the composer's girlfriend at the time, and it isn't long before it becomes a completely different kind of pursuit theme.
Ultimately, Shostakovich's best-known symphonies are cautionary tales. Look what happened in my country, he tells us. Don't let this happen in yours. How crushingly ironic that an orchestra from the UK – sufffering under one of the most sadistic totalitarian regimes in the world at the moment – would be responsible for such deeply insightful performances.
March 31, 2021 Posted by delarue | classical music, Music, music, concert, review, Reviews	| album review, classical music, GIANANDREA NOSEDA, london symphony orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra review, LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA shostakovich 10 review, LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA shostakovich 9 review, LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA shostakovich review, Music, music review, orchestral music, protest songs, shostakovich, symphonic music | Leave a comment