Conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy, the Philharmonia’s Voices of Revolution series painstakingly explores the musical response to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Exacting in his choice of material, Ashkenazy examines the often thin dividing line between art and propaganda. This remarkable concert framed Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, completed in exile in 1921, with three Soviet classics rarely heard in the west: Alexander Mosolov’s The Iron Foundry (1927), and two works by Reinhold Glière, the suite from his ballet The Red Poppy (also 1927), and his Concerto for Coloratura Soprano and Orchestra (1943).
Mosolov’s glorification of machine-age labour pins you to your seat with its decibel count and thumping cross rhythms. Starting out as a post-romantic, Glière reinvented himself after 1917 as a precursor of socialist realism, and The Red Poppy depicts Soviet sailors on shore leave in Kuomintang China. The Sailors’ Dance is familiar as an orchestral encore. More striking, however, is the passionate love scene, in which the Internationale surfaces in a heady adagio after the fashion of Glazunov’s Raymonda. The Coloratura Concerto, meanwhile, is effectively a two-part bel canto aria, exquisitely written and scored.
Ashkenazy conducts this repertory like one born to it, eliciting a terrific response from the Philharmonia throughout. Done as well as this, The Red Poppy proves infinitely persuasive, and you surrender to it completely. Nadezhda Gulitskaya sings Glière’s concerto with silvery tone, beautifully negotiated staccatos and formidable high notes. Behzod Abduraimov is the soloist in the Prokofiev, wonderfully alert to its tricky amalgam of aggression and grace: for his encore, he gives us Schubert’s F Minor Moment Musical, done with infinite refinement.
