Tchaikovsky’s Manfred was among the most popular of his works in his lifetime, though the composer himself expressed ambivalence towards it, and some, doubtless taking their cue from him, professed unease until recently. Based on Byron’s dramatic poem, it’s a portrait of a Romantic outsider, wracked by memories of an incestuous obsession with his sister and alienated both from society and the natural world. Many have seen it as a projection of Tchaikovsky’s own troubled psyche, and it is probable that his eventual negativity towards the score (he once called it an “abomination”) derived from concerns about the public exposure of deeply private emotion.
That it contains some astonishing music is, however, beyond dispute.
Vasily Petrenko has long been regarded as one of its major interpreters and his performance with the London Philharmonic was enthralling from start to finish. Avoiding the psychodramatic approach, he presented the work as a mature tragic statement of great integrity. The huge outpouring of defiance and anguish that closes the first movement shocked with its intensity, while the work’s closing bars, which can sometimes seem religiose, suggested genuine spiritual calm after the maelstrom that preceded it. Gathering tensions were balanced by exceptional attention to detail, nowhere more so than in the tricky scherzo, where Manfred sees the apparition of an Alpine spirit in the spray of a waterfall and woodwind and strings conjure up an almost hallucinatory display of colour.
Its companion piece was Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, with Augustin Hadelich as soloist, a player of great technical accomplishment and elegance. The finale dazzled with its speed and prowess. Elsewhere his determination to avoid sentimentality resulted in an occasional lack of poetry. His encore of the andante from Bach’s Second Violin Sonata was intimate, poised and beautifully done.
