26th July 2023
Royal Albert Hall, London, United Kingdom
RACHMANINOV The Bells
SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 5
Mané Galoyan (soprano)
Dmytro Popov (tenor)
Andrei Kymach (baritone)
BBC Symphony Chorus
Hallé Choir
Hallé
Sir Mark Elder (conductor)
22 years in the UK, I have actually never heard the Hallé and Mark Elder, live or on recording. So I am here tonight to correct this shameful record, before the Manchester baton is passed onto the Singaporean dude. Perhaps more importantly, I am here for a rare outing of Rachmaninov's "The Bells" (after Edgar Allan Poe). Rachmaninov is universally loved for his beautiful melodies and brilliant piano writings in his solo works and concertos, but his choral and orchestral works are incredibly difficult to pitch. The problem is, Rachmaninov comes across as being a conservative and, frankly, backward-looking composer. If you take away the pretty melodies, a lot of his orchestral writings build on old forms, sequences over long stretches of time and minimally developed thematic materials embedded in thinly veiled orchestrations, so quite often they are either militantly repetitive or dreary. "The Bells" suffers from this, I personally find, and it requires a large force so no wonder why it is not performed often. There are the occasional exciting moments, like III, but mostly it conforms to Rachmaninov's usual morbid taste and obsession with death, but one that drags on and gets stale unlike the Paganini variations. Don't get me wrong, the performance was excellent, the BBC Symphony Chorus and Hallé Choir were outstanding in presenting a full-bodied and homogeneous sound which I doubt you can get outside the British choral tradition, and Elder squeezed a sumptuous and detailed orchestral sound from the score that Rachmaninov probably didn't intend. The soloists blended perfectly into the whole texture. It was all-round fantastic. Is Shostakovich necessarily more groundbreaking? For most of his oeuvre, probably not, but his soundscape is certainly more colourful and varied, and the historical and political contexts add much emotional weight. I very much admired Elder's treatment of "Symphony No. 5" tonight, though it's not the usual temperament I am used to. When you grow up listening to Bernstein's Sony recording, you tend to think it's classical music's biggest middle finger, with all the sarcastic heroism mocking socialist realism. You don't get much of that with Elder here, but instead the highlights were the eerie and haunting slow movements in which each phrase was milked to the last drop. Incredible playing. The audience acted as if everyone was waiting for a big singalong in IV. Not insanely fast as some take it, but it's DSCH 5. Everyone will erupt in applause no matter what you do, and everybody did.
