Sunday 05 February 2012
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra: A Post Christmas Toy-Box Played Out @ Brighton Dome
I knew as I sat in our study (the small room at the back of the house looking out over the old twisted apple tree in our garden and down towards Preston Park) that I was going to review the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, at the Dome Concert Hall in Brighton that night (4/02/12).
I consciously try not to play the same music that I will be hearing that night, so I was listening to Spear of Destiny’s One Eyed Jacks, songs like “Playground of the Rich” and “Liberator” sadly seem more relevant today with their despair at inequality and spirit of revolution and change.
Then of course my thoughts drifted to the concert, part of which was to be the Great 5th Symphony by Dmitry Shostakovich, the great Russian Composer of the 20th Century.
It always feels hard to reconcile revolutionary zeal with the consequences of its victory for people like Shostakovich, who was unfortunate to live under the years of the Stalinist oppression.
This great man had his nerves shattered as he lay awake at night, in terror of the black cars that drove the streets of Moscow rounding up victims for the Gulags or worse – terror, torture and death in the Lubyanka prison.
Shostakovich wrote the Fifth at a time when he was out of favour with the administration.
On the surface it seems to be just the uplifting social-realist work that the Stalinists were looking for. Modernism, so popular in the early years of the revolution, was out as the ‘pigs’ donned the mantles of ‘men’ in the Animal Farm of the evolving Soviet System.
In reality it was a work riddled with subtle irony. Shostakovich himself said in his memoirs:
“I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth.
The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Gudanov. It’s as if someone is beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing’, and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing’ ”.
Revolution, it seems, can have more twists and turns than the tree beneath my window, and how different the feel and view of the park is from afar to when you are down in the valley and actually stood in it, how different it must be to view a terror through the distant prism of history, compared to being there yourself.
How interesting for us down at the Dome then, with the Fifth ready to fill the second half of the programme, that Beethoven’s Leonore No.3 from the great Opera Fidelio was the opening work of the evening.
Fidelio is of course an opera about a rescue from prison, the overthrow of tyranny and the restoration of a new free administration. Just like the French/ Russian Revolution(s) (at first) I wonder?
It is hard to draw in to this theme of Freedom vs. Terror, the second and final work of the first half, “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” by Rachmaninov. Paganini’s “Violin Caprice in A minor” is famous as the theme tune of the old South Bank Show.
Perhaps with what the programme describes as its “Simplicity, clarity and strong harmonic structure” it represents the ideal world just after the revolution when everything seems new and free? Who knows?
If you have not seen the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra before, as I had not, then you a re missing a real treat.
A stage overloaded like a Christmas toy-box with a rich jumble of wonderful instruments and talented players was brought together brilliantly by the wonderful female conductor Marin Alsop.
Alsop is the Music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and is the Chief Conductor of the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra starting this year. She is also Music director of California’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.
This was a great performance of some great music by this great, unpretentious and talented orchestra.
Their performance of the Fifth Symphony was stunning. Expressive, exciting and technically right on the nose this was one not miss.
by: Howard Young (Arts Editor)
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