Could it be a riposte to Vasily Petrenko’s rival band up the road that Sir Mark Elder chose to launch the Hallé’s new season with an all-Russian programme? The account of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto by the young Korean pianist Sunwook Kim was as exhilarating as any recent performance on Merseyside, if a little less idiomatic. Kim took a measured approach, weighing each note with meticulous care. It was poetic, intelligent and equally adept with the passages of gentle rain as those of rolling thunder.
Mussorgsky’s little prelude Dawn on the Moscow River is the deceptively tranquil scene-setter to his far-from-tranquil opera Khovanshchina, and a piece that the Hallé has never played before. In Rimsky-Korsakov’s transparent orchestration, it emerged as a beguiling wisp of a melody that yawned and stretched like the awakening of the Russian soul.
Mussorgsky branded Rimsky-Korsakov “a soulless traitor” for abandoning their shared amateur principles and accepting a position at the St Petersburg Conservatory. Yet the symphonic suite Scheherazade carries a spontaneity that could only come from someone who had mastered the art of orchestration entirely by themselves.
Rimsky-Korsakov stated that he had three factors in mind when creating the work: “folk song, the Orient and the sea”. The gravitas of Elder’s reading suggested there could well be a fourth: Wagner. Rimsky-Korsakov attended every rehearsal of the first Russian production of the Ring Cycle while working on the suite; the concept of leitmotifs and some of the dark brass coloration, may have seeped into his score. The Hallé’s leader, Lyn Fletcher, played Scheherazade’s seductive theme as if her life depended on it, though perhaps the measure of a great orchestral leader is the ability to keep one’s head while all around are losing theirs.
• This programme is repeated on 20 and 23 September at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester. Box office: 0161-907 9000.
