Friendship won

Results of the World Symphony Orchestras Festival

The last two concerts of the Festival of Symphony Orchestras of the World, which so suddenly and with such pomp emerged from oblivion, with the London Academy of St. Martin in the Fields on the first evening and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France on the second, became the culmination of the program and its semantic core. Not in the sense of status (no one here surpassed the Novosibirsk Symphony Orchestra, whose concert was attended by the President himself), but in the sense of artistic content - and this despite the fact that both ensembles, like their conductors (Klaus Peter Flohr and Myung Wug Chung) , are relatively unknown in Russia. They bypassed their more famous colleagues - Lorin Maazel and Zubin Mehta - easily and naturally: it turned out that the magic of a name alone is not enough for complete success, and the final layout in orchestral solitaire still (and thank God!) determines the real quality of performance.

In the case of the London “academics,” this quality was declared literally from the first chord. When, against the backdrop of the rustling tremolo of the strings in Weber’s overture to the opera “Freeshot,” four horns entered with crystal clarity, gifting the Hall of Columns with a wonderful consonance, the unprepared listeners, and I confess, literally took their breath away. The last time I encountered such a sound culture live, it seems, was five years ago, when the Berlin Philharmonic showed up in Moscow. The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, christened after the famous London church where the very first concert of the musicians took place, has been cultivating a high style of orchestral playing for almost half a century. Having made a name for themselves with countless recordings and performances with major soloists, the Academicians declare their independence by working only with guest conductors (the exception is their founder Sir Neville Marriner), and in this case their partner was the German maestro Klaus Peter Flohr. His dialogue with the orchestra was perhaps the main intrigue of the concert, the program of which, in addition to Weber, included Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony and Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony. This is not the usual dominance of the conductor over the musicians: despite the charming liveliness of the maestro on the conductor’s podium, he transmitted his ideas to the stage and to the audience very unobtrusively and tactfully, giving the band’s signature style with its ideal balance and precise sound lines warmth and spontaneity. Dvorak was especially successful, performed without the usual Slavic cloying: as it turned out, English restraint and aversion to any external effects suit this author very well.

The Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra and Myung Woon Chung were on a different trajectory - starting with Ravel's impeccably conceived but coldly formal sounding My Mother Goose suite, but then literally crushing everyone and everything with Bruckner's Sixth Symphony. A “non-grossing” author for Moscow, and even with his least popular creation (the Sixth Symphony is difficult to hear live not only in Moscow, but also in Europe) became ideal material for Chung (in which old-timers could recognize the pianist - winner of the 2nd prize at the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1974), a conductor with an incredibly clear and spare gesture, skillfully building the architectonics of the whole. Having built a rather loose four-part cycle in one straight line and pulled all the semantic poles to the poetic Adagio, Chung presented a work of rare skill, demonstrating along the way all the advantages of his team, the main one of which is the ability to understand each other at a glance and think together. It was all the more a surprise to hear, after such a titanic work of seventy minutes, two marvelous encores with which Chung, without knowing it, “washed” his predecessors - the Hungarian dance of Brahms in his performance revealed much more subtlety and less salonity than that of Lorin Maazel, and the overture to Bizet’s “Carmen”, alas, knocked out the Novosibirsk brethren and Arnold Katz. And yet, despite the wild success of the encores, it was Bruckner who became the trump card of the orchestra, and indeed the entire festival, unexpectedly introducing Moscow to the most relevant and powerful phenomena in the world of symphonic music.

Mikhail FIKHTENGOLTS