One more stream from the 'underrated conductor' gallery. Andrey Boreyko, whom somehow I'm occasionally in touch with, which more means I try to engage him in conversation and he sends me polite messages back that clearly indicate he hasn't read a word of what I write him. But Boreyko, as I've said before, is one of the unknown greats of the conducting world and he sent me a link to this concert he did with the Svetlanov Symphony in Moscow, one of Moscow's two great orchestras. The orchestra clearly has trouble with the Hindemith Concert Music for Strings and Brass, but when you have a brass and string section with this depth and weight, it's too good an opportunity to pass up, and when they let rip it is something to behold. Boreyko is both one of the great living Shostakovich conductors and an atypical one who makes us feel we don't know the composer yet. The well over 20 minute slow opening, which trips up so many performances, is a thing of wonder here. The dynamic gradations (my god those pianissimos....), the extreme specificity of intensity within every phrase, the instrumental colors, and of course, the expressive sincerity. So many of the most famous names in Shostakovich do not pay any attention to Shostakovich's very detailed tempo indications, but in this very complicated movement Boreyko never misses a 'beat.' The vast majority of musicians will either make much too much of a tempo change or just plow through a piece without any change at all. A sign of mastery is a musician who takes the amount of care to get those changes exactly right and still have enough time left over for other rehearsal details. One might wish the rest of the symphony kept up with Shostakovich's impossibly fast metronome markings, but that probably involves a level of rehearsal impossible in covid restrictions (even in Russia...). Instead, what we have is a refined discipline in which Boreyko finds all kinds of details missed by every other conductor I can think of. There are much less refined ways to make Shostakovich convincing. I don't know if Boreyko's way with the score is Shostakovich's Shostakovich so much as it places Shostakovich somewhere between the elegance and romanticism of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov on the one side and an avant-garde precursor to Penderecki and Gubaidulina on the other.
The old Shostakovich style: the 'musical brutalism' of old Soviets like Mravinsky/Kondrashin/Svetlanov, is impossible to recapture today. It is an unrepeatable musical moment tethered to its times. No conductor or orchestra today would be able to recapture the knife's-edge terror you hear in those old Soviet radio recordings in drenchedly oversaturated sonics. The old Soviet recordings are irreplaceable documents of their lethal milieu, but first-generation performances of any composer are still only a rough draft of all the secrets great music is capable of yielding. Shostakovich was aiming at something much more subtle than Mravinsky or Kondrashin allowed Shostakovich to be. The current third and fourth generations, be they little-known names like Boreyko or Mark Wigglesworth or Oleg Caetani, or well-known names like Vasily Petrenko and Gianandrea Noseda, or be they superstars like Andris Nelsons and (yes...) Valery Gergiev, find secrets which Mravinsky could never dream a work holds, but if Shostakovich's scores are to be believed, Shostakovich often knew all along...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1QMrgChgQg&fbclid=IwAR25Z-51UeaUpsDLNkUBEQm6Un0nKaKV0PHYmRoORZ-vDZ58HoZeWo2Yz0c
No comments:
Post a Comment