live review – BBC Prom 68 – 5 September 2008
For the centenary of Rimsky-Korsakov’s death, one of his operas, albeit a short one, was finally performed complete at the Proms. A shame it was the wrong one, and that compared to the anniversary tributes to Messiaen and Vaughan-Williams, Rimsky got short shrift this season. Kashchey the Immortal, a short, late work (1902), was instructively contrasted with the first masterpiece of Rimsky’s most celebrated pupil, Stravinsky’s ‘The Firebird’ and was inevitably found wanting. Kashchey (a.k.a ‘old rattle-bones’) was the connection; the malign sorcerer dominates both works, and features in several Russian folk-tales collected by Victor Afanasyev (1826-71), a Russian Brother Grimm – and a source for many Russian musical works.
Richard Taruskin, in his monumental survey of Stravinsky’s Russian works has detailed how the harmonic processes of Rimsky’s self-avowed most modernist work were fundamental to those of the young Stravinsky. But the Albert Hall is a cavernous venue for a harmony lecture. Rimsky’s ‘autumnal fairy-tale’; an in-between work from an over-productive period, does not show its neglected creator in the best light. Its orchestral colouring is predominately muted, much of the lyrical writing is formulaic and the obsessive, calculated nature of the harmonic experiments, and the symmetry of phrase lengths and longer periods leave a short-winded and cloying impression. Still, there were glimpses of magic: Kashchey’s powers enforced by a (literally) spell-binding array of accrued pedal notes scored in mahogany, a hypnotic chorus of snowflakes, and all of the music for the sorcerer’s Wagner-derived daughter, Kashcheyevna, with its piquant prickles of celesta and harp and genuinely ground-breaking chromaticism, is worth a hearing. And, the opening stretches aside, the work has pace and an appealing sense of filmic transition that dispatches the story efficiently.
The London Philharmonic played with extreme allure, even if they did look comatose at the final bows. Vladimir Jurowski balanced textures exquisitely, if coolly, but kept the piece moving and shaped it sensitively. The singing was beguiling. Elena Manistina’s resinous mezzo Kashcheyevna – the only character not a cardboard archetype – coloured her low lying forays with hues of flint and honey, and her transfiguration that leads to Kashchey’s death being released in her tears and her transformation into a weeping willow was compelling. Tatiana Monogarova’s Princess, a timbre both slightly covered but focused, with the silkiest of legatos, really came into her own in the sinister enforced lullaby to Kashchey, in which she wishes him dead. Her deliverer, Prince Ivan, is a cipher, but Pavel Baransky’s rock-solid baritone imbued him with presence, and crowned his curiously conventional little romance with a stunning top Ab. Mikhail Petrenko blustered mightily as the Storm Knight. Only Vyacheslav Voynarovsky’s Kashchey disappointed – he seemed score bound and failed to put across the venom, fanaticism and caricature that this Slavic Mime would seem to demand.
Unexpected counterpoint was provided by some well-timed downpours on the Albert Hall roof, eerily coinciding with the Storm Knight’s outbursts. But, given a chance, Rimsky could rattle the roof on his own, and it was a shame that the more extrovert vocalism and orchestral high-jinks of Mlada or Sadko were not exhumed to mark his centenary.
[first published in OPERA magazine]
© JULIAN GRANT 2008