The centrepiece of the St Petersburg Philharmonic’s London concert – part of the orchestra’s lengthy UK tour with its chief conductor Yuri Temirkanov – was Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with Maxim Vengerov as soloist. It wasn’t quite the extraordinary performance many expected. At its best, it was a poised affair that didn’t always fully probe the work’s emotional resonances, and the relationship between Vengerov and the orchestra seemed, on occasion, to be in less than perfect accord.
He played with great lyrical dexterity, an attractive weight in the tone and a beautiful sense of shape and line, though we could have done with a bit more drama in the first movement. The orchestral contribution, however, was at times curiously disengaged. There were fine passages: the Mozartian elegance of the opening bars; the sudden whirl of excitement as we approached the first-movement cadenza; a real warmth in the sound in the Andante. Yet elsewhere, things seemed cool, the playing scrupulous rather than ideally committed.
That the orchestra is – or can be – among the greatest and most exciting in the world was amply borne out by the rest of the concert, however. They opened with Kikimora, Lyadov’s exquisite miniature depicting the mischievous house spirit of Russian folklore, ravishingly played, with every shift of colour and mood impeccably judged. After the interval came Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, written for the orchestra in 1953, when it was the Leningrad Philharmonic. Temirkanov’s interpretation has tremendous authority, though the predominant mood is one of bleak uncertainty and anger rather than the more optimistic expression of relief at the demise of Stalinism that we sometimes find elsewhere. The players, meanwhile, just seem to have this music in their systems. It’s hard to imagine the symphony better done, and it was a privilege to hear them perform it.
