The one who got away

Vladimir Jurowski conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra

In
4 minute read
Vladimir Jurowski: lean and leonine and intensely focused. (Photo by Alexander Nikiforov)
Vladimir Jurowski: lean and leonine and intensely focused. (Photo by Alexander Nikiforov)

The best performance I have heard in the Nézet-Séguin era occurred at this past week’s Philadelphia Orchestra concerts, but it was led by someone else: the Russian maestro Vladimir Jurowski, principal conductor of the London Philharmonic, among other duties, and a recent candidate for the Philadelphia directorship.

This is not a knock on Yannick, who has injected an energy and enthusiasm into the orchestra not seen since the days of Riccardo Muti, and who has no less importantly helped maneuver the organization through its presently troubled financial time. But when Jurowski is at his best, there is no more kinetic conductor in the world today, and his performance of Leos Janacek’s magnificent Taras Bulba, only the third in the orchestra’s history, was simply the most exciting piece of music-making I have heard in years.

Jurowski is lean and leonine and intensely focused onstage. His gestures are precise and commanding, and his grasp of even the most complex scores is evident at once. He makes no effort to charm or cajole, but you can’t not play your best for him: he is just scary-smart and utterly serious. Maybe that wouldn’t play in the long run in Philadelphia, which has a tradition of showmen on the podium and found Christoph Eschenbach a little too ascetic for its tastes. But I am always glad when Jurowski comes to town.

A year ago, Yannick Nézet-Séguin began a concert with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, certainly an unusual warm-up piece. Jurowski went him one better this time, opening with the Emperor Concerto, which he conducted with cellos and basses switched to the left of the stage and violins to the right.

Pianist Yefim Bronfman was the impeccable soloist. He has none of the rock-star twitches of some younger performers on the circuit; a rumpled man in late middle age whose hair makes Bernie Sanders look well-barbered, he just lets the music flow from under his fingers without any wasted motion or false urgency. Jurowski gave him a clear, tactful accompaniment. We think of Beethoven’s Emperor as a work of large and declamatory statement, but it might as well be called the Pizzicato Concerto for the amount of delicate plucking featured in the scoring. Altogether, it was an eminently satisfying reading.

Melancholy lyricism

If you ask which 20th-century composer was Russia’s most prolific symphonist, you are apt to reply Shostakovich, but the palm actually goes to Nikolai Miaskovsky (1881-1950), who turned out 27 symphonies to Shostakovich’s 15. Miaskovsky was a major musical and pedagogical figure in the first decades of the Soviet Union, and a 1935 CBS radio poll ranked him among the top ten living composers in the company of such figures as Stravinsky, Ravel, and Rachmaninoff.

Essentially a late Romantic composer in the mold of Rachmaninoff or Barber, his works, always well-made, have an appealingly melancholy lyricism that continues to win him a devoted if diminished following, the present author among them. The Tenth Symphony, which Jurowski programmed in its first orchestra performance since Stokowski led the Philadelphia première in 1930, is an outlier in the corpus, an aggressively modern work that Miaskovsky himself referred to as being “as massive as iron.” Bronze might be the better comparison in fact, since the work takes for its program Pushkin’s famous and rather grotesque poem, “The Bronze Horseman,” which also inspired a ballet by Miaskovsky’s contemporary Reinhold Glière, coincidentally composed at the same time.

One needn’t overly concern oneself with this background, because the work is taut and pounding — indeed, at times blaring — with strands and episodes of more lyric writing occasionally breaking through. Jurowski put the orchestra, particularly the brass, through its paces, and held the score aloft to the audience at the work’s end to signify its personal importance to him. The Tenth was written in 1926-27, during a decade that was unique in Russia’s cultural history for its modernist experimentation — Shostakovich and Prokofiev wrote their most aggressively dissonant scores during it. Jurowski, though clearly committed to the Tenth, doubtless had other neglected masterworks from that suppressed era in mind.

Swoops and darts

Janacek’s Taras Bulba, based on a Gogol tale about a 17th-century Cossack warrior, was completed in 1918, a year when all eyes were turned on Russia as it embarked on its Communist experiment — and abruptly dropped out of the Great War. Here, too, the program is less to the point than the brilliantly original music and scoring.

Janacek’s music is all swoops and darts, as if holding any idea too long would violate a personal rule, and, if less dissonant than Stravinsky’s or Bartok’s, it is also more restless and in its way demanding. That it also coheres for all its kaleidoscopic changes is a testament to the fundamental core of inspiration and continuity of craft behind it. Jurowski made every moment a sonic adventure, drawing from all choirs of the orchestra virtuoso playing of the highest order.

It simply doesn’t get any better than this, and I think such a performance is not only what audiences live for, but orchestras themselves. When a great orchestra rises with its full heart and sound to great and demanding music, life is very full. So it was on this occasion.

What, When, Where

The Philadelphia Orchestra. Vladimir Jurowski, conductor; Yefim Bronfman, piano. Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73 (“The Emperor”); Miaskovsky, Symphony No. 10 in F minor, Op. 30; anacek, Taras Bulba. February 11-14, 2016. The Kimmel Center, Broad and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia. 215.893.1999; philorch.org

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