RNO Sweetens a Dvorak Suite, Sharpens Shostakovich

Mikhail Pletnev with the Russian National Orchestra (Photo: RNO)

Wednesday evening the Russian National Orchestra set up at Benaroya Hall for a one-night performance of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, and Dvorak, and wandering through the lobby prior to the concert, you sometimes were immersed in Russian conversation to the exclusion of English.

The hall was packed to the balconies--the RNO has press clippings other orchestras dream of, and it would be a special event to hear them in Benaroya, which has press gushing about its lively, warm acoustics that other halls only dream of.

For that matter, the stage itself would end up packed, as brass and woodwind players piled on for Dvorak's Cello Suite and Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony. Seattle Symphony musicians were part of the extra effort, though one blended right in--there off to the left was Mikhail Shmidt, who was born in Moscow.

RNO conductor Pletnev is not an imposing figure, but he runs on his own time. He refused the excitement brimming over from the crowd to focus instead on the mournfulness of the opening work, Tchaikovsky's Elegy for String Orchestra, which was an exercise largely in pulling time into almost translucent sheets of sound, flinging them up in the air, and watching as they turned...slowly...invisible. Pause. Begin again. Paradoxically, silence turned out to be what I remember most from this piece, silence and the question of whether to break it.

For the Dvorak Cello Concerto in B minor, Sergey Antonov joined the proceedings. The concerto is hugely popular and, with Dvorak, you often end up with the impression that his homesickness for Bohemia during his sojourn in the U.S. did him the greatest favor it has ever done any composer. The musical contrast of nostalgic and rousing melody, the mercurial shifts in mood and color, are hard to resist.

The concerto is a feast for its cello soloist, though it's the clarinets who have the first word in the opening Allegro. Antonov won the Gold Medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2007; he's slender, tall, with floppy bangs, and wore a three-quarter-length coat that seemed both visually dramatic and uncomfortable. My quibble is that the aggressiveness with which attacked some phrases was, in fact, troppo. (If he was an actor, I'd wonder what his motivation was.) The French horn solo, on the other hand, carried exactly the loving kindness you'd want to hear on your deathbed.

So then we were at the Shostakovich. In the program notes, Steve Lowe (who is one hell of a guy, by way of full disclosure, and a thoughtful writer) makes the persuasive case that "humorous" and "light-hearted" is not the sum of the Ninth Symphony.

And in RNO's performance, the Allegro is full of the manic gaiety of shellshock, a post-war hysteria fueled by exhaustion and starvation. In the second movement's "sad waltz," I thought I could hear a sudden keening in the winds, a surprise emotional upwelling that stopped everything in its tracks, was choked back down. Later comes a grim parody of a military march. I don't think the Ninth can yet--was meant to--transcend its context, the place of its birth. It's not a work you think of as strictly musical, freighted with meaning and argument as it is. But nothing brings all that home, I discovered, quite like hearing the Russian National Orchestra perform it (which is possible on CD, if you missed them).