Anatoly Lyadov was an extraordinarily talented musician but lazy. He was kicked out of Rimsky-Korsakov’s composition class for truancy and when asked by Diaghilev to compose The Firebird dilly dallied so much that the task went instead to the brilliant young Stravinsky. The concert opened with his The Enchanted Lake, a gentle very moving piece of poetic background music.
The Russian conductor, Andrey Boreyko, brought on the piano soloist, Alexander Gavrylyuk, who was born in the Ukraine in 1984, to play the most popular of Prokofiev’s five piano concertos, No 3. The balance between the piano and orchestra is one of the exciting features of the work. The young pianist was very much in command of his keyboard to the absolute delight of the near capacity audience who were treated to an encore from him.
The interesting lecture beforehand came from a first violinist’s point of view. Alison McIntyre took us through the night’s programme with excerpts of the part she would play on her violin. It was the snippets of insight that made it all the more entertaining.
Clearly the Orchestra had enjoyed preparing a Russian concert under a Russian conductor and he had reciprocated. Normally he is conducting rather rigid Germanic orchestras. She played her part on the violin to show how he decided to make slight variations in the final work, Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, for the Dundee performance, another for Edinburgh and another again for Glasgow because the Royal Scottish National Orchestra could handle those subtleties.
Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony opened with the bassoons of Principal David Hubbard and Fraser Gordon. But what the whole page profile of David Hubbard in the programme did not tell us was that he was playing his new Heckel, made for him in Wiesbaden and second to none in the world of bassoon makers.
The violins, violas, cellos and double basses were busy with a lot of string plucking, pizzicato, as we reached the third of the four movements. Alison McIntyre had told us that it was not unknown for audiences, clearly not as educated as those in the Usher Hall, to believe that the end of the third was the end of the symphony.
On one occasion a conductor decided it appropriate to leave it there and he and the unnamed orchestra went off. On another occasion, she told us, a young upcoming conductor had placed the fourth movement in front of the third. But we heard the symphony in full and in the right order to the triumph of conductor and orchestra and a particularly appreciative audience.
Event: Friday 4 February 2011 7.30pm.