Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Owain Arwel Hughes
St David's Hall
As this year’s Welsh Proms – the celtic baby sister of the BBC’s mammoth
classical music festival – nears its close, St David’s Hall filled to the
rafters for an annual fixture, the Russian Prom. The Royal Liverpool
Philharmonic were joined by decorated Welsh conductor Owain Arwel Hughes, the founder,
curator and underwriter of the Welsh Proms.
The Slavic cornucopia opened, aptly, with Glinka’s Overture to the opera
‘Ruslan and Ludmilla’. The piece was ably played and served as a
musicologically appropriate overture to the concert, but if it was lacking in
style, we had only the composer to blame. It is well known that the piece was
hastily hashed together by Glinka during dress rehearsals. Clearly no
masterpiece, then, and one is left wondering, ‘why programme it?’
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| Photo: Welsh Proms Cymru |
Indeed, it was programming that let this concert down: Musorgsky’s
‘Night on Bare Mountain’; Rachmaninov’s ‘Vocalise’; Borodin’s ‘Polovtsian
Dances; and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. Glinka notwithstanding, these pieces
are undoubtedly masterpieces, but all so well-known and, for want of a better
word, overplayed, that you could leave before you arrived. Would it have been
inexpedient, say, to substitute the Tchaikovsky symphony for a short,
lesser-known suite by that composer, relinquishing the symphonic limelight to
one of Borodin’s sublime chefs-d'oeuvre? (Better yet would be to forgo
Tchaikovsky altogether, to better explore the works of, for instance,
Balakirev, Lyadov, Serov, Stravinsky, Prokofiev or Shostakovich, to name but a
handful).
But back to the performance. The Glinka was followed by the very welcome
genius of Musorgsky’s demonic ‘Night on Bare Mountain’. The orchestra played
brilliantly, but their dynamic extremes were exhausted far too soon and, sadly,
the piece was lacking a great deal of that marvellous mysticism which surely is
the point of a Russian Prom. These stylistic gremlins were the fault of
conductor, not orchestra: Mr Hughes’ handling of the piece was far from
elegant.
It was downhill to the interval. The Rachmaninov was far too slow and
consequently any gestural lyricism in this lovely little piece was torn out.
The Borodin recovered much of this, but suffered from the absence of the vocal
chorus.
The Tchaikovsky was largely excellent. Strings and wind differed greatly
in their rendering of the Allegro theme in the first movement, which abnegated
the crucial thematic cohesion, but the entirety was exciting and evocative, and
if the fortes were a little belligerent, it was certainly possessed of the
crucial "Joie de vive [sic!]" ascribed to it in the programme notes.
So, the concert suffered from poor programming and an interpretive void
in the conductor which did this superb orchestra little credit. The Russian
Prom is a fine idea, but something has to change for next year.
Peter L. Wagstaff
