Tuesday, 26 August 2008
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Saturday, 16 August 2008
Prom 34: BBC Philharmonic/Noseda
"Weak, strained, childish and bombastic," is how Rachmaninov described his own First Symphony after its fatal 1897 premiere. Posterity has proved him wrong, merely even so, few would rate the symphony a masterpiece. A young man's work, it attempts to steer the Russian symphony towards post-Romantic extremism, just lacks the formal control to give its emotions shape or meaning. Gianandrea Noseda's execution with the BBC Philharmonic, however, was so exciting that qualms about the piece itself were just set aside.
Rachmaninov's debt to Tchaikovsky was more than once apparent - but so, too, were the intimations of the composer of the Paganini Rhapsody and the Symphonic Dances. The overall effect, however, was of toppingly articulated delirium, breathtakingly played and utterly overwhelming.
The concert's real raison d'�tre, however, was a performance of Il Tabarro, to brand the 150th anniversary of Puccini's parturition. Noseda has not conducted Italian opera in the UK for more than a ten; this was a reminder of what we experience been missing. Conducting with unnerving chasteness, he treated the opera as an analysis of marital failure, all the while reminding us that the itinerant lives of its protagonists are too a metaphor for the uncertainties of the human condition.
It could mayhap have been more systematically sung. Barbara Frittoli was wonderful as tragic, extramarital Giorgetta, though her intensity level was not quite matched by Lado Ataneli's soft-voiced Michele or Miroslav Dvorsky's sometimes common Luigi.
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