Sounds of Soviet Russia are revived in Bordeaux
Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano.
Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.
Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.
You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:
“Portraitures and caricatures: Conductors, Pianist, Composers”
here.
The Orchestre National de Bordeaux Aquitaine added another feather to its cap last week (June 1-2) with the engagement of a leading international guest conductor, Michail Jurowski, who led the ONBA in two demanding orchestral pieces, the Shostakovich Symphony No. 6 and the Prokofiev Cinderella ballet music.
Jurowski brought with him a heavyweight legacy of his own Russian family antecedents plus his formative years alongside the great musical figures of the Soviet years – Oistrakh, Rostropovich, Kagan, Gilels and Khachaturian. As a youngster Jurowski knew Prokofiev personally and played four-hand piano pieces with Shostakovich.
The family friendship with Shostakovich has helped establish Jurowski as one of the foremost interpreters of the 15 symphonies. His Bordeaux appearance and his selection of music for the evening thus highlighted a rich legacy that few living conductors could claim today.
ONBA players were still abuzz with the experience after the engagement was completed. His natural authority and his sense of history had been clear even in rehearsal. One member of the orchestra told me his Russian background brought some intangibles such as the vivid colors behind the printed score. He made his ideas plain but “nothing was imposed by force,” the section player said, “but there wasn’t much room for discussion. There was a sense of Soviet authority about him.”
Jorowski speaks no French and little English but the language barrier was quickly overcome with hand signals and nods. “A raised finger was enough to silence us. He certainly was no pussy cat,” the player said. Occasional words in English were blurted out but he relied more on numbers. “He was very precise. But working with him was an enormous pleasure for all of us.”
The Sixth Symphony is perhaps not the most obvious of the Shostakovich oeuvre to excite a Bordeaux audience. Even its Moscow premiere in 1939 was criticized as starting too slowly and somberly, followed by two shorter and swifter movements, labeled respectively allegro and presto. The unusual structure puzzled the critics. One writer found it overly abstract, lacking in folk melodies and the heroic grandeur of the Fifth Symphony -- official requirements of the day. Worse, Shostakovich was in bad odor from his most recent flop, the controversial 1934 opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”, a tale of murder and adultery.
The Sixth began a gigantic monument to Lenin; the buildup in the Soviet press created expectations of choral-orchestral work with prominent soloists and patriotic text. Shostakovich never explained why he scaled it down to this more modest instrumental work.
The Bordeaux performance in the city’s cavernous Auditorium was an earnest reading by a committed orchestra but the material, to me, only meandered. “Abstract” is a good word to describe it. Jurowski worked hard to maintain tempos and polyphonic passages, interspersed with solo turns by flute, piccolo and woodwinds. Finally, the last two minutes grew to a din of brass and percussion that virtually shook the walls. If it was calculated to trigger applause, the Bordeaux audience responded. Jurowski, limping on a cane, returned for three curtain calls, and invited his featured players to take individual bows. The applause, including rhythmic clapping, went on for ten minutes.
The program also included Prokofiev’s “Cinderella” ballet music, a colorful piece of 50 scenes. Some ballet music can stand on its own as a symphonic creation, notably Prokofiev’s earlier and more successful “Romeo et Juliette”. But the complexities of rhythm and mood in “Cinderella” succeed mainly in one unintended aspect – making the listener yearn for a ballet troupe.
To be fair, the music echoes with stirring Prokofiev harmonies and melodies, the main one even overheard being hummed by some audience members at the smoke break (this is France) during intermission. Without surtitles of images, however, it was a stretch to follow the Perrault children’s classic story. True, key moments such as the waltzing ball and the midnight chimes served as reference points.
In this recording, considered to be the gold standard, Vladimir Ashkenazy conducts the Cleveland Orchestra in familiar passages:
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