The BSO's programme last night was titled Musical Pictures. We wondered what the Sibelius Violin Concerto was a picture of and I still haven't found an answer but it's never a bad thing to have a concerto and so we didn't mind.
Rachmanninov's Isle of the Dead broods quite benignly with its riff in the cellos and bass and elsewhere before reaching its climax. Its gloom isn't too sinister and it by no means reduces the composer's high standing in my regard, whose range goes from those lush piano concertos to the Russian Orthodox Vespers.
On a night dominated by Russians, I hope I wasn't taking a short cut by finding Sibelius at his most Russian-sounding in the concerto. There could have been traces of folk song in there that owed something to Finland's overbearing neighbour. Nikita Boriso-Glebsky was technically dazzling and perhaps at his best when delicacy and deftness were required but it took a while for the performance to gain authority or momentum. It finished well but I was surprised to find that for a second time in recent years it was the Sibelius piece in a concert that was the slight disappointment. That is not what one expects will happen.
I don't know if it was Nikita or me that felt more at home in his encore which was a movement from a Bach partita or sonata but it retrieved the situation and then some as one wondered if it was only one violin or a duet but the solo includes its own accompaniment when the bow is on the appropriate side of the strings to play the required notes. Brilliant.
Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was a teenage favourite of mine in both the piano version and Ravel's orchestration. Many of my generation would say Emerson, Lake & Palmer and I'm not too snooty to acknowledge that, too. It's just that I didn't repeatedly listen to that in those formative years. I generally preferred the piano version on the grounds that less is more but hearing the full orchestra from the third row made clear the difference between listening to its full range of sound textures in the flesh compared to a recording on a small cassette player. The brass were tremendous, but the woodwind were superb as well in their lively parts, the percussion is prominent, there are two harps, saxophone and everybody gets a turn. I hadn't realized quite what a good job Ravel had done on it.
Alexander Vedernikov is an entertainment in himself as conductor, at one moment leaning on the rail of the rostrum and waving the baton nonchalantly in the general direction of the orchestra but then apparently engaging in bad dancing like a maestro buffa, and next imperious in a bucolic pastiche of a Karajan or Klemperer. But he got a performance out of the BSO, who are a great orchestra anyway, and for only the second time in my life I added my own 'hurray' to the applause almost involuntarily. It is a monumental piece of writing and orchestration in a performance like that and, as we always do from these concerts, we went home in fine spirits.