Sofia Gubaidulina Revue Music for Symphony Orchestra and Jazz Band; Ravel Piano Concerto in G major ; Shostakovich Symphony No. 13 in B flat minor, ‘Babi Yar’. Benjamin Grosvenor piano, Kostas Smoriginas, bass; Synergy Vocals, BBC National Chorus of Wales (lower voices), BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Ryan Bancroft conductor
Yet another Prom completely packed out…..this just wouldn’t have seemed possible for a programme like this 20 or 30 years ago. Nevertheless, Proms programming can sometimes be a bit mystifying and one wondered about the rationale for putting these three works together. While Gubaidulina and Shostakovich go together well enough, and maybe the former also with Ravel, given jazzy inflections, it’s difficult to see much connection between Ravel and Shostakovich, other than the stark contrast between French levity and Slavonic gloom. Anyway, an interesting mix of works to look forward to……..I heard the Shostakovich work for the first time live last November, and this Prom was one of the first concerts I decided on for this season.
Sofia Gubaidulina died in late March this year, her death perhaps coming too late to have too much influence on Proms programming. The Revue music was commissioned for a planned-for popular music venue which never happened, when she was at a low ebb financially. There has been intermittent attention to her work in previous Proms (including an all-Gubaidulina programme conducted by Gergiev with Maryinsky forces in 2002!). This work is a peculiar combination of jazz band, with four close harmony vocalists, and Gubaidulina’s more usual preoccupation with slow dark orchestral timbres, gongs and bells, and a sense of sacred mystery. There are several sequences of these two alternating kinds of music, some whispered text about stars, eternity and stillness, followed by a rousing mix of the two, finishing, as it started, with bells and gongs. Strange…..but I rather enjoyed it……
The Ravel piano concerto I last heard a few years ago in Sheffield,with Steven Osborne, Mark Elder and the Halle. This performance didn’t make quite as much impact on me. The cor anglais (I think, maybe an oboe) solo in the slow movement was most beautifully played, and Grosvenor’s playing was light and agile, but somehow the performance overall lacked the grace, the finesse, the easy wit it should have. This might have been due to a number of factors – I think the first movement was taken too fast and sounded pressurised and at times the orchestra sounded a bit ragged (a friend at the interval who knows the work better than me said the first horn missed, or miscalculated, an entry in the first movement).
Shostakovich 13 has only been played at the Proms three times before this evening – its Proms premiere was as late as 1992 (ie 15 or so years after his death) and 2006 saw Gergiev, with Maryinsky forces, conducting the work. I find this symphony increasingly impressive, the more I listen to it. The combination of Shostakovich’s spare, stark music, and Yevtushenko’s poetry is very powerful. The work seemed particularly apposite on the day of Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska to discuss the ending of the Ukraine war, in reminding us of a very different Russia beyond the walls of the Kremlin, of the suffering of its people over the ages and the greatness of its artists. The work also, in its first movement, reminds us, beyond the egregious war crimes of Israel’s current government (and Hamas’) of the horrors of 19th and 20th century anti- Semitism.
My peculiar seating position for this concert didn’t help my appreciation of the performance (at the very end of the side stalls nearest the stage, so slightly behind and to one side of the singer – I don’t understand the logic by which the RAH allocates seating …. I must have been one of the first to book for this concert yet had one of the worst seats in the category I booked for). From where I was the men’s chorus sounded a bit disjointed at times. The singer, a Lithuanian, clearly had excellent Russian diction – he didn’t quite have that black Russian bass sound that maybe the music needs, and I didn’t get much sense of variety in his singing. The orchestra sounded, to me, more on the ball than for the Ravel, with Bancroft whipping up some enormous climaxes.
Altogether a very rewarding concert
John's musical journey 