Russian works bring audience to feet
On an evening of nearSiberian cold, a Russian Winter Festival warmed the Ohio Theatre.
Music Director Rossen Milanov led the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk and bass-baritone Adam Cioffari in Russian Winter Festival II, a concert of works by Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.
The orchestra glowed in Mussorgsky’s kaleidoscopic score for the Coronation Scene from Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” one of the most musically breathtaking scenes in all of opera. Though a lighter voice than is typical for the role of the title character, Cioffari’s bass-baritone was rich and committed. Together and at full volume, the orchestra and chorus rang through Mussorgsky’s score with magisterial brilliance.
Pianist Gavrylyuk played the wiry early moments of Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” with the snap of splitting ice. As the score called for lusher sounds, Gavrylyuk delivered. At every turn, the orchestra and Gavrylyuk
made pristine chamber music of Rachmaninoff’s sprawling score. Milanov gets credit for pulling it all together.
Among countless gems in Friday night’s Rachmaninoff, notable were the freedom of Gavrylyuk’s phrasing in the recitative-like transition into the first slow variation, his pearlescent passagework two variations later, the waves of sound that ebbed and flowed in piano and orchestra through the famed 18th Variation, flying piano octaves and all manner of technical feats that would bring Paganini to his knees. After all that sound and fury, the devilish humor Gavrylyuk squeezed out of the work’s final notes made those in the audience laugh out loud and jump to their feet with shouts of “bravo.”
Even showier than Rachmaninoff’s variations were the variations on “The Wedding March” from Mendelssohn’s incidental music for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which Gavrylyuk played as an encore, earning a second standing ovation.
The orchestra played the first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15, a work that seems much like a compendium of games with orchestration, with the bite of a Moscow blizzard.
Haunting string solos and brass chorales painted a bleak landscape in the second movement Adagio. The orchestra captured an elegiac tone in hushed dynamics until the gut-wrenching emotional outburst at the movement’s dynamic climax.
The third movement — a classic Shostakovich dance of death — laughed all the way to the gallows in crisp motives sprinkled around the orchestra. In the symphony’s finale, Milanov’s pacing through the crescendo of instrumentation to the dynamic climax was masterful.
Milanov segued directly from the Shostakovich into the Cherubic Hymn from Tchaikovsky’s “Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom” and led to lovely moments fit for contemplation.