The London Philharmonic’s season is dominated by Vladimir Jurowski’s Rachmaninov retrospective, a big, contextualising survey that aims to reassess his work.
The latest instalment placed the First Symphony alongside Scriabin’s Piano Concerto in F Sharp Minor and Szymanowski’s Concert Overture, which is something of a rarity.
Post-Romantic Rachmaninov and loopy-visionary Scriabin at first sight inhabit different worlds.
Born a year apart, however, they shared the same piano teacher in their early teens, and eventually became fellow star pupils at the Moscow Conservatory. Written when both composers were in their mid-20s, Rachmaninov’s symphony and Scriabin’s concerto were both premiered in 1897 and famously flopped: Rachmaninov, indeed, was to be haunted by the failure of the First for the rest of his life.
Though it has its champions, of whom Jurowski is clearly one, it remains a problem piece. It’s dark, antsy music – Rachmaninov was embroiled in a traumatic affair with a married woman during its composition – and its grand passions continuously threaten to tip into neurosis. The heightened and rather unvarying emotional pitch can be difficult both to sustain and to listen to in performance, though Jurowski did wonders with it in an interpretation at once extreme, exciting and formidably played.
Scriabin’s concerto, in contrast, is a thing of ultra-refined beauty, with filigree piano writing and sensuous orchestral effects that teeter on decadence. The soloist was the sensational Igor Levit, an undemonstrative virtuoso, who teased every imaginable colour from the score. The LPO sounded ravishing here, as well.
Szymanowski’s overture, however, didn’t convince. It dates from 1906, and is again the work of a man in his mid-20s. It’s curiously derivative: Strauss’s Don Juan is its main reference point. Energetic conducting and fine playing couldn’t disguise its lack of originality. Szymanowski, mercifully, went on to better things.
