London already knows the incoming music director of the Royal Opera as an orchestral conductor of distinction in Mahler and the Czech repertoire, but Hrůša’s Shostakovich was new – to me at least – and it held a previously inattentive audience spellbound.
The Eleventh occupies a curious place in Shostakovich’s symphony cycle. Long deemed to represent a lowering of critical sights, its cinematic mise en scène has proved to have a wide appeal even to those bored by the more obviously ‘symphonic’ process-pieces in battleship-grey. How Shostakovich was persuaded to join the Communist Party in the Khrushchev era when he did not do so under Stalin remains a puzzle, but perhaps the more programmatic Eleventh, Twelfth and Thirteenth Symphonies can be viewed as a tactful but strategic ‘civic trilogy’. Be that as it may the BBC Symphony Orchestra has previously played the score under conductors both predictable and less so, from Sir John Pritchard to Semyon Bychkov. Performances can run to well over 70 minutes though Kirill Kondrashin took less than 54. Hrůša favoured a middle of the road 65. The BBC Symphony Orchestra played eloquently whether in the long stretches of expectant hush or the vivid machine-gun climax of ‘January 9th’ where the sudden swiftness did not preclude shock and awe. Rostropovich used to go slower with leering glissandi from the trombones en route but Hrůša’s was a more cultured sound in every department. The timpani were properly tuned, violas displaying a rare lustre in the third movement as elsewhere. Sounding through an orchestral clamour more lucid than it can be, the bells at the end were finally dampened rather than being allowed to ring on. If that was the intention. This is an acoustic that plays tricks.
Where Shostakovich had acolytes like Mieczysław Weinberg, Janáček was followed by Pavel Haas and others whose music has only been revived with any regularity since the 1990s. Several of these exercised the last of their creative energies in the ghetto cum transit camp at Theresienstadt (Terezín) where Haas was perhaps least touched by Schoenbergian expressionism. Shortly after the premiere of his Study for Strings, filmed expressly to dupe the outside world, he was among the musicians transported to the gas chambers, conductor Karel Ančerl being one of very few survivors. Haas composed the eight-minute Scherzo Triste more than two decades previously in 1921 when a member of Janáček’s composition class. Save for some disruptive urban agogics, the template is Janáček plus. Paula Kennedy’s useful programme note explained that Debussy’s La mer was a work selected for in-depth academic study. The ‘unfinished’ feel is presumably deliberate – a sort of low-key Straussian transfiguration fizzles out – but the composition’s title has almost nothing to do with its content, a hint of Jenůfa’s millwheel as close as it gets to scherzo-like motion.
More run-of-the-mill or at least more intimately scaled was the evening’s centrepiece. In 2015 the American pianist Jonathan Biss asked five contemporary composers to write concerto companions for each of Beethoven’s five piano concertos (he has been recording both for the Orchid label). We drew the short straw with a thoroughly scrupulous, well accompanied account of arguably Beethoven’s least interesting work in the form. It may be heretical to say so, but this is not a work that gains much from elegant objectivity and there were occasional smudges, possibly attributable to acoustic anomalies, amid the sparkling articulation of the outer movements. The Rondo fairly flew by. Quite why the audience was granted an encore in the form of a Schubert Impromptu I can’t imagine. Twenty-five minutes of a child’s incessant coughing and the rustling of a plastic bag had made it difficult to concentrate on proceedings. Who would be a musician? Advance publicity for the concert had promised a 9pm finish. 55 minutes out!
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