Translated material
Do you love Brahms?
Large Symphony Orchestra in Search of Lost Romanticism
Vladimir Fedoseev and the BSO opened a new cycle of four concerts - with four symphonies and four instrumental concerts by Brahms in the program, with an epigraph from Francoise Sagan (“Do you love Brahms?”) and a timid hope for at least some correction of humanity stated in the preface : Fedoseev invited the public to “allow themselves to put on glasses with pink lenses, softening the harsh harshness of life, or darkened glasses - saving them from cold artificial light” in order to look at the world with a already forgotten romantic feeling.The conductor believes that modern people experience an acute “longing for romanticism,” even if they themselves do not notice it, that they have forgotten how to experience the delight of love, and in this sense, Brahms, “the most romantic romantic,” and a new concert monograph (before Brahms there were already Beethoven , Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky) he has high hopes.
If the cycle from Tchaikovsky's music took place on Sunday afternoons, then the twilight romantic still got the evening - Fedoseev himself, wanting to certainly continue the daytime concerts, which, in his words, gathered, in his words, “an amazing, new audience,” felt that Brahms was still too gloomy for daytime performance (for Sundays, sacred music programs are currently being planned).
Nevertheless, it was precisely the gloom - crushing or hidden, but often acutely felt - that remained behind the scenes of the first concert of the cycle. The violin concerto with the young soloist of the Philharmonic Alena Baeva, who boldly replaced the suddenly ill Viktor Tretyakov, was performed strongly and festively, the First Symphony was deeply, solemnly and frankly melodious. Fedoseev and his musicians seemed to be saying: “There is nothing hidden in our Brahms, everything secret in him becomes clear.”
One can give a lot for just the sound of the orchestra in the introduction to the concert - despite the fact that the softness, depth and flexibility of the sound, the non-rude richness of the tutti, the melodiousness of the strings, the concentration of transparency in the sound of the winds, the organic balance and naturalness of the tempos accompanied the orchestra's playing throughout the evening.
As for the young soloist, who showed an enviable strength of spirit, sound, articulation and passages, she played powerfully, very correctly and even sensibly distributing ardor (if not athleticism) and gentle elegy in the form, but it became good where strength gave way to the flexibility of sound and phrase .
Brahms' melodiousness, almost Slavicized, fluid and viscous, lush and flowing melodicism, it seems, became Fedoseev's main idea that evening. And, perhaps, the performers even “quail” the First Symphony a little, making its thick flow somewhat hypertrophied, rounding out the graphic features of the texture, in which both nerve and darkness can hide. But this was probably required by both Fedoseev’s hearing and the mission of returning to romanticism.
The next concerts in the cycle will include the First Piano Concerto with Elizaveta Leonskaya and the Second Symphony (February 12), the Double Concerto with Tatyana Grindenko and Alexander Knyazev and the Third Symphony (March 12), and finally the Second Piano Concerto with Frederick Kempff and the Fourth Symphony (April 15). Once a month until the beginning of real spring, the BSO will conduct these precisely calibrated and powerful (judging by the incredible energy of the first concert) injections of romanticism in unromantic times.
Meanwhile, Fedoseev himself, distracted from the lofty, is also engaged in not at all romantic things: on the eve of the opening of the cycle, at a press conference, the chief conductor of the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra shared his doubts about the correctness of the situation that has developed today with the financing of Russian orchestras. Having received a Presidential grant four years ago (along with the State Symphony Orchestra, Temirkanovsky Orchestra, Bolshoi and Mariinsky Theaters), Fedoseev believes that the recent idea of a new Government grant (several Moscow orchestras received it, including the NPR, RNO, “New Russia”) “devalues the values , confuses the public in matters of assessing the quality of orchestras” and equates already “established” and, on the contrary, “not yet established” groups.
If we take into account inflation, the problem of “staff turnover”, which not all orchestras have just managed to get rid of, the problem of choosing “grant recipients” (Fedoseev drew attention to the fact that such worthy orchestras as the Novosibirsk or Yekaterinburg orchestras did not receive grants, there are only Muscovites on the list), then the idea becomes clear. Although, judging by the reactions in the professional community, the same “problem of choice” was resolved ambiguously in the first - Presidential - decision.
The conductor sent a personal letter to the President of the Russian Federation with a proposal to index the grant and told reporters that a collective letter signed by all recipients of the first Presidential Grant had been sent to the same address.
Almost each of them today asserts their elite status in different ways. And the BSO in this sense should hardly be afraid of a newly formulated (or rather simply confirmed on paper) competitive situation, since the professionalism of the musicians and the quality of its programs are obvious here.