A very personal programme this, hardly one to attract crowds and very different in tone from the team’s multi-media take on Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie for the Southbank’s Multitudes festival. Both the RPO’s advance publicity and the conductor’s pre-concert chat played up the notion of a trio of sacred mysteries. First came cleanly delivered Mozart, a tad anonymous perhaps. After that the cantata by Sergei Taneyev (1856-1915) upped the ante.
Taneyev’s music is not quite forgotten in the West. Vladimir Jurowski conducted John of Damascus in this very hall in 2015, his typically tense and virile account running to little more than twenty minutes where Evgeny Svetlanov would take nearly thirty. Clocking in somewhere between the two, Vasily Petrenko excelled. It helped that his forces were not only well-drilled but also big and grand, no trace here of the recent tendency to downsize. Over one hundred strong, and impressively trained by chorus master Gavin Carr, the choir even managed the right sort of vibrato at the outset if ultimately sounding more Anglican than Slav. Taneyev’s self-consciously detached, avowedly academic, almost Brahmsian invention ought to sound pale. And yet there is something rather special about the austerity of the orchestral adagio with which it begins, the elevated mood unexpectedly compelling, drawing you in. Whatever the context, Taneyev’s chords are often coloured as if in a piece by Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov and Petrenko shaped any lyrical passages foregrounding the strings with flair and feeling, the Russian way. One motivic element appeared to anticipate the Sibelius of the Second Symphony. Meanwhile the text – English surtitles were provided above the stage – revealed a narrative like that of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius with another saintly figure poised on the threshold between life and death. Elgar is musically indebted to Wagner’s Parsifal, only here the link was more tenuous. Taneyev wrote treatises on counterpoint. Does it show too much? In any event, the piece is unlikely to receive stronger advocacy on the South Bank.
I do not know whether Petrenko has conducted Parsifal in the opera house, but he has included snippets previously in the UK and lately directed Act 3 in Oslo with Toby Spence in the lead. On this occasion he directed a non-vocal symphonic suite prepared by conductor Erich Leinsdorf. This preserves the original sequencing of component parts but does so at the expense of the meaningful musical continuity sought by Andrew Gourlay in his more radical, recently published Parsifal Suite. There was no darting about the score but not everything came off. The bells were lame (Schott would have provided something sonorous and electronic), the trajectory no clearer. Unlike Toscanini, Petrenko kept the initial Prelude on the move as if reluctant to reach peak transcendence too soon. While the performers seemed to find the appropriate resonance in the extracts from Act 3, their audience was, as so often, divided. Most attendees were raptly attentive. A smaller group read mobile phones, dropped bags and/or launched into spasms of coughing every time the music-making threatened to move towards the ego-death of the sublime. Premature applause was another hazard. Petrenko might enjoy playing to the crowd, but his body language makes it plain that he abhors this barbaric practice. A partial standing ovation nonetheless.
