A mixture of galloping brilliance and passion
Bbcso/bychkov
Royal Albert Hall ★★★★★
Since he began it almost a year ago with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Semyon Bychkov has taken his Tchaikovsky Project – under the banner of Beloved Friend – as far afield as the New York and Czech Philharmonics. So it was good to hear him back with the BBCSO for the composer’s longest orchestral work, the Manfred Symphony.
As befits its Byronic subject, Tchaikovsky’s late-period work is big and tortured, making huge demands on its players. Bychkov had all the architecture firmly mapped out and brought dramatic tension to its long spans, allowing him to get the best from the orchestra. The lugubrious colouring of the start was a case in point, and although the BBCSO always seems at its most committed for Bychkov, the strings had uncommon power here.
By contrast, everyone sustained the long scherzo with quicksilver lightness, right up until the moment when the music finally evaporates. The middle two movements evoke bucolic, Alpine aspects of the story, and the Andante represents Tchaikovsky at his most poetic.
After the final ride to the abyss and a blistering fugue, the intervention of the organ was without the usual bombast; Bychkov ensured that it cast a redemptive halo over the end.
Preceding this came works from other Russian composers dating from the final years of Tchaikovsky’s life.
A pivotal figure, Taneyev was a pupil of Tchaikovsky and the teacher of Rachmaninov, yet he has been overshadowed by both.
This was the first Proms performance of his overture The Oresteia, a big piece connected to his great operatic project. Essentially an action-packed tone poem, it is full of music that shows the composer taking Tchaikovsky’s influence in new directions, and Bychkov unleashed all its strange power.
Outwardly, the biggest influence on Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto is neither of these Russian forebears but the celebrated concerto of Edvard Grieg. As heard here (in its final 1917 revision) with the soloist Kirill Gerstein, it also distils the essence of Rachmaninov; in the finale, especially, its mixture of galloping brilliance and yearning passion foreshadows the composer’s late Paganini Rhapsody. Poised and patrician by standards of Rachmaninov playing, Gerstein held back at first, but delivered the slow movement with improvisatory freedom and dazzled with crystalline virtuosity in the finale. Hear this Prom again on the BBC iplayer. All Proms are broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.