Moscow Virtuosi, Vladimir Spivakov conductor, Live in San Francisco

[pianoforte]

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Moscow Virtuosi, Vladimir Spivakov conductor, Live in San Francisco
Primus Inter Pares
Reviewed by Dr. Gary Lemco
Rating: *****
The Moscow Virtuosi is a precision ensemble of some thirty hand-picked players led by their violinist-conductor Vladimir Spivakov. Established in 1979, the Moscow Virtuosi took principals from many of the leading Russian orchestras, as well several independent soloists, and refined them into one, integrated and homogeneous instrument. An instrument wherein Spivakov – a brilliant virtuoso who made his American debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1975 – performs as simply one more gifted interpreter in the midst of his fellow-players, primus inter pares, first among his eminent equals.

That his colleagues admire and respond to his every musical gesture is attested by the nimble freedom of expression Spivakov commands; the flexibility of line, and the quicksilver baton technique which he occasionally flourishes like a master fencer his epee.

The concert at the Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on Saturday, November 13 opened briskly, with Bach’s C Minor Violin-Oboe Concerto (c. 1730), a reconstruction of a piece more familiar in its two-piano arrangement. For this sleek and streamlined performance, oboe Alexey Utkin, a tall man with a silken tone and technique, collaborated. The light hand and the long line marked this rendition, whose opening movement sported lovely echo effects, with Spivakov’s bending and dipping his body to the contour of the musical phrases. The second movement Adagio has been likened to two seaweed making love, a ravishingly graceful duet with plucked accompaniment with a beguiling modulation to G Major. The last movement danced and lilted at once; a marvelous interweaving of textures whose transparency was surpassed only by its charm.

The Shostakovich Chamber Symphony in C Minor (1960), an orchestration by conductor Rudolf Barshai of the composer’s emotionally bleak Eighth Quartet, is a work stricken by the inhumanity of Man. While it claims to be a memorial to the horrors of war and the victims of world fascism, it gropes blindly for a source of stability, as though the composer had just been reeling in the throes of emotional calamity and devastation. In five connected movements, the music communicates an unrelieved tension, rife with self-quotation from the E-flat Cello Concerto and several symphonies, as well as the composer’s own name (DSCH) as a kind of anagram – a throwback to both Bach and Schumann, but without any of their innate optimism or faith in human nature.

Long-held pedal points often serve as lugubrious transition passages. The often brooding harmonies and slow evocations often burst forth with anger and emotional frenzy; a bitter-sweet waltz emerges from the ruins, a gallows-humor that “laughs but smiles no more.” These alternately haunted and ironic figures came to us as would an extended plainchant, a somber, almost ecclesiastical presentation by Spivakov and his gifted ensemble, not the least of whom were Alexey Lundin, his plaintive first violin and first cello, Viacheslav Marinyuk.

The second half of this emotionally gripping program opened with another paroxysm of emotion, Arnold Schoenberg’s hyper-Wagnerian sextet Verklaerte Nacht (Transfigured Night, 1899, rev. 1943) after a romantic poem by Richard Dehmel. Cast in one, continuous movement, the piece has a sectionalized structure of four parts; a form Schoenberg borrows from both Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy and Liszt’s B Minor Sonata. The piece opens in a despairing D Minor to proceed, more or less programmatically, to a plunging climax wherein the woman of the poem confesses she is with illegitimate child. But redemption comes in the form of a D Major reply by the man to whom she confesses, stating that he will redeem woman and child by the power of love; and the music becomes a string orchestra version of Tristan und Isolde’s Act II Liebesnacht in glorious string technicolor, with passing quotes from Massenet’s opera Thais. Spivakov’s realization of this highly charged, sensuous score kept his audience spellbound, rapt and enthralled by the pulsing and shimmering textures.

But what a perfect tonic to the gloom and tortured spirits did the music of Mozart prove! A wonderful, galant work in the spirit of light opera and the virtuoso, Mannheim tradition, the B-flat Symphony (1773), a work of a seventeen-year-old wünderkind, bubbles with lyrical affection and zesty rhythms. Again, that scintillating homogeneity of attack and stylistic execution made an irresistible, even glamorous musical combination: Joyful rocket figures, perfect orchestral trills, a long, singing line, and a studied, crisp orchestral crescendo, all conspired alchemically to make the Moscow ensemble a model of sonority and elegant taste; the very virtues Mozart cherished as a practitioner of the highest art.

With the playing of their third encore, a sultry Piazzolla tango, the Moscow Virtuosi concluded a wonderfully colorful concert for the whooping, whistling audience, of whom many were Russian idolaters come to worship at a musical shrine. We had already enjoyed the world’s briefest encore, a blistering Praeludium by Shostakovich in the manner of a blistering Paganini caprice; and then a jaunty, evocative "Forest Dance" by Belá Bartók.

And if the encores were not enough, there had been the program proper, listed here: Bach’s Concerto in C Minor for Violin and Oboe, BWV 1060; the Shostakovich gloomy Chamber Symphony in C Minor , Op. 110; Schoenberg’s erotic-mystical Verklaerte Nacht, Op. 4; and Mozart’s charming Symphony No. 24 in B-flat Major, K. 182.