Review: CBSO / Mariinsky Orchestra at Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Oct 16 2009 by Christopher Morley, Birmingham Post
CBSO/ Mariinsky Orchestra at Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Exactly 100 years separate the Berlioz Requiem from Prokofiev’s Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, both of them occasioned by revolutionary events, and both of them viewing their respective texts with a slightly quizzical eye.
It is difficult to imagine Berlioz subscribing unquestioningly to the sentiments of the Latin Mass for the Dead (why did he feel the need to aggrandise the title of what was still only his Opus 5 to Grande messe des morts?), and Prokofiev was dangerously treating his Marx, Lenin and Stalin texts with sardonic irony.
Individually, each work makes huge demands upon the stamina of both chorus and orchestra. Together they constitute a marathon which only the most committed, expertly coached, can hope to deliver with success, let alone on two consecutive evenings.
But this is what happened at Symphony Hall on Wednesday (repeated last night), when the CBSO and its chorus joined forces with the Mariinsky Orchestra and its own chorus under the calm, reassuring and authoritative baton of Valery Gergiev.
Balances between these massive orchestral forces and choristers were perfectly achieved, even when joined by Berlioz’s four brass bands ranged around Symphony Hall’s acoustically perfect auditorium, and the tenor solo from Sergei Semishkur, high aloft in the hall’s stratosphere, was floatingly affecting in the Requiem’s Sanctus.
The Berlioz boasts some unashamedly grotesque scoring: once he has discovered the combination of high flutes and raspingly low trombones he cannot leave it alone. And did he feel eight sets of timpani were really necessary, more a visual spectacle rather than an aural one?
Prokofiev’s scoring in his cantata is much more emblematic, cinematic even, with a military band, streetwise percussion, and an orchestra of accordions to inject bathos into the grandiosity of the texts he dared to set and puncture with satire.
Suppressed for several decades out of fear of retribution, even long after the composer’s death, Prokofiev’s score lives and breathes with the fingerprints of his film, opera and ballet scores (there is so much of Romeo and Juliet in this).
Out of the banality and sinister totalitariansim of his libretto he manages to create a soundworld which both resonates with acceptance and subverts with satire. Has a work beginning and ending in C major ever sounded so threatening? This is really an astonishing piece, and I just wish this could have come in the second half of the programme, after the fustian of the Berlioz.
Choral projection in both works was exemplary, the collaboration between two great orchestras was totally without ego, and the CD-set of the Berlioz immediately on sale afterwards will preserve for all time this fabulous enterprise.
Rating: 5/5
