Symphony No 94 (Surprise) - Haydn
Gogol Suite - Schnittke
Trumpet Concerto - Haydn
Miraculous Mandarin Suite - Bartok
The National Symphony Orchestra's new principal conductor, Alexander Anissimov, has chosen to start a reinstatement of Haydn to his rightful place in the orchestra's musical programming. The great early master of the symphony has had pretty sorry treatment from this orchestra over the years, a story of neglect, not much leavened by the occasional unstylish airing of one of his works.
Anissimov adopted a generally old-style, big-band approach in the Surprise Symphony. He kept his players fairly well drilled but didn't find much air in the textures or achieve fair balances for the woodwind. The performance did have some nice touches. The scaled-down opening to the second movement was a rare and successful venture into true pianissimo which paid off handsomely, though Anissimov will have to make a little less podium noise in calling forth the famous surprise if he wants its eruption to retain any true vestige of the unexpected.
Scottish trumpeter John Wallace sounded off-colour in the Haydn concerto, having difficulty matching the lighter scale of the orchestral playing, and sounding tonally undernourished in quieter passages.
The real achievements were to be found in the outer works. Schnittke's Gogol Suite, compiled and orchestrated by the conductor Gennady Rozhdest vensky from incidental music to a 1976 Gogol medley, The Dead Souls Register, is a typically polyglot trash-can of a work, grotesque, witty, sophisticated in its crudeness. It's a fair introduction to the stylistic switchbacks of Schnittke's world, and was here done with cunning sharpness.
Bartok's pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin, a sleazy tale of a prostitute who seduces men to be robbed, is among the composer's most gripping compositions. Anissimov's handling of the suite showed he has the full measure of the music's menace - even the three clarinet solos depicting scenes of seduction were edgily tainted - and he brought forth from the NSO some of the most astonishingly violent playing, fired with a dark blaze of brass, that I've ever heard from them. Let's hope that the audience's enthusiastic response will encourage RTE to schedule the score of the complete ballet, with the eerie choral ending which, sadly, finds no place in the suite.
