Cathedral Canvases: Mussorgsky’s Mirages Courtesy of Jakub Hrůša
Hallowed halls of images made magic harmony at the conductor’s baton in an all-Russian recital at Royal Festival Hall.
Jakub Hrůša comfortably in command. Credit: Luca Migliore.
Majestic zest impresses upon most of Mussorgsky’s delights; portraying fright and might with iron thuds of resonance. At risk of garishness in many maestros’ hands, his compositions often surface in façades both overbright and monolithic: tasteless replicas of oil on canvas.
Exorcising these demeaning demons from his reputation, conductor Jakub Hrůša vivified vignettes across Mussorgsky’s two most popular creations in an afternoon performance at Royal Festival Hall yesterday: brushstrokes shaken awake by a baton’s audacity.
Sirens rent serenity asunder as first violins mimed witches’ cries in Night on Bald Mountain: an ode to mythic rituals surrounding St. John’s Eve in folklore. Proportioning the natural raptures of the scene, Hrůša let brass instruments emerge both crass and crisp; allowing for a set of roars synchronically bestial and elegant. Flutes whispered whistling winds while second violins let lightning’s zippy pizzicati rip. Across a visual cavalcade of man’s ferocity earth’s onomatopoeia reigned sublime.
In a swift exit from the Russian Empire’s late zeitgeist, cellist Steven Isserlis led the audience into Soviet composer Kabalevsky’s Second Cello Concerto. Skimping on the orchestra, the 1964 score channels dissonance both musically and psychologically; estranging its core player with anaphoras of pizzicato throbs. Inclining his interpretation to a timid instability, Isserlis offered his motifs a slim vibrato, lining passages with an intrepid sense of fear.
Technical transitions were perfected but the repetitions of the music could have been more strongly underscored. Where a hypnosis was imaginable Isserlis refrained from drawing parallels between the clones of staves; reneging on accentuation’s ominousness. Diminuendi glided out a little hastily and necessary decadence was missing in the lower tones. While a harp performed infusions psychedelic in its flutters Isserlis’s cello opted out of the work’s idiosyncratic scratches – lending straitlaced rhythms to suggested madness.
In contrast falsely lulling melodies in Simon Haram’s alto sax intoned the errant psyche subtly intimated by the work, together with the “Presto marcato” movement’s tremulous descents on violin.
Embarking once again upon bombastically stacked attacks of strings, the maestro whisked his listeners into the realm of Pictures at an Exhibition: Mussorgsky’s magnetic magnum opus. Magnitude applied to each vicissitude of its ten landscapes in this craftily assorted orchestration, straining concentration with its swiftly changing slides.
Hrůša’s refined rendering lent the bassoon’s famed solo ostentatious mysticism worthy of an unrestored cathedral – guiding ears through wall-wide canvasses designed like Guernica to enter, not behold. Conveying strings across exactly timed dynamic arches, the conductor fixed cathedral-like acoustics into the precisions of each section’s volume; looming over every musical compartment to accord it self-possession.
‘Gnomus’s portrait of a snapping nutcracker earned superhuman realisation in the guise of eerily timed strings; lugubrious interludes on double basses hammered home the moans of Baba Yaga. Rumbles went unhumbled on the second violins and “call and response” sections called to mind experiments on nursery rhyme themes. Auguries resounded unignorably throughout the last tale’s – ‘The Great Gate of Kyiv’s – elastically chromatic scales.
In a vast tableaux of mimicry conductor Hrůša took the congregation into other worlds; affixing on this secular array divine largesse. Arrestingly fulfilling such a quest, the maestro beautifully empowered music’s perpetuity.