On one level an old-fashioned Sunday afternoon matinee, this impressive concert was also a more than usually comfortable fit for two ongoing series: the RPO’s own ‘Lights in the Dark’ strand and the Southbank Centre’s multimedia ‘Multitudes’ mini-festival. It was prefaced by one of Vasily Petrenko’s charmingly unreliable spoken introductions.
After a decently played Finlandia we moved on to the Weill songs, composed between 1942 and 1947 and mostly overlooked since. Petrenko, in his short opening address, seemed to think otherwise – Weill is clearly not a specialism – but then Roderick Williams had not sung them before either. Thomas Hampson apart, it is hard to think of any front-rank singer who has. The neglect may be due in part to the fact that Weill orchestrated only part of the sequence. Or perhaps people find the settings overstuffed: Weill does cram a lot of text into 17 minutes and Vaughan Williams was more selective with some of the same source material. Or is it the mix of Brechtian and Broadway manners that unsettles? I can only report that I found the songs fascinating and, in the case of the third, ‘Come up from the fields, Father’, genuinely moving. The scoring there was posthumous, the work of conductor and composer Carlos Surinach. Roderick Williams still has unrivalled diction though the voice is thinner in the bass and can recede into inaudibility at phrase ends. Petrenko did not always scale down his accompaniments, accordingly, zeroing in instead on piquant woodwind interjections and the like. The three large video screens required for the main event were inactive during the Sibelius but displayed some harmless abstract squiggles during the Weill. No matter because we also got the Whitman texts as surtitles.
After the interval Petrenko’s familiar interpretation of Shostakovich’s ‘Leningrad’ was accompanied by more highly developed video work. Many of the expected tropes were there – buildings were blown up, nuclear bombs went off, the green environment was scorched red – though not necessarily in the order suggested by the music. A recurring feature was the presence of an enlarged human eye. We began with a rift valley and ended with flowers. I’ve no idea what it all meant but this installation, credited to Ilya Shagalov and Kirill Serebrennikov and commissioned by the Southbank Centre and the Royal Philharmonic, at least avoided coming across as a succession of fancy screensavers. Musically speaking we were in safe hands. Petrenko shaped the opening gestures with less militant clarity than might have been expected, keeping something in reserve for his outsize RPO. The still passage after the first movement climax was one of several showcasing the special eloquence of the flute. The scherzo was Bernstein-slow, the Adagio powerfully expressive, the finale at once indomitable yet still ambivalent at the close. There followed a partial standing ovation.
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