San Diego Symphony music director Rafael Payare long ago established his credentials as a Mahlerian. He’s conducted no composer more often, has recorded Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Rückert Lieder, and featured Mahler’s Second and Third symphonies — the latter coming weekend — to bookend the symphony’s 2024-25 season.
And this weekend at Jacobs Music Center, Payare proved his credentials as a Shostakovich interpreter are coming up fast. Aside from the Russian’s Fifth and Eighth symphonies, he’s conducted and recorded, the Eleventh, and on Friday wowed with Shostakovich’s Seventh, “Leningrad.”
There’s no mystery why Mahler and Shostakovich both happened to write ambitiously massive symphonies — in length, orchestral size, movement number and emotional range. Shostakovich studied Mahler’s scores closely early on; late in life he flatly stated “Mahler and [Alban] Berg are my favorite composers even today.” His “Leningrad” shows the master’s influence.
For this titanic work, the symphony pulled out all the stops. The symphony’s creative consultant, Gerard McBurney, and actor-director Rosina Reynolds introduced the sprawling piece with a nicely executed spoken set-piece on the piece’s historic moment (about which entire books have been written). University of San Diego’s Jeff Malecki gave one of the better pre-concerts I’ve heard. Even the program notes of Symphony’s program-writer emeritus, Eric Bromberger rose to the occasion.
The buck stopped, however, with the music. The Seventh’s famous first movement — the USSR’s supposedly “simple, peaceful life” brutally interrupted by the German Wehrmacht — was intense, exciting, unrelenting. Piccoloist Lily Josefsberg and flautist Rose Lombardo’s duet in the central section set the tone for standout woodwind contributions all night long.
As the Siege of Leningrad commenced, French horns, trombones, trumpets perched in the chorus seats rose to augment the enlarged brass section’s din and timpanist Ryan Dilisi’s cannonade. If maximum excitement and sheer volume are what you want in this half-hour “War” movement — and of course you do — Payare and players delivered with thrilling force.
For this listener, the real magic was the second (scherzo) and third (adagio) movements (“Reminiscence” and “Home Expanses” in Shostakovich’s original titling). Payare seemed to hold their otherworldly timbres and flavors up for special savoring. Sarah Skuster’s oboe, Valentin Martchev’s bassoon, Frank Renk’s bass clarinet, and Lombardo’s flute gave the ten-minute scherzo its garish, brittle — yes, Mahlerian — quality.
The unified strings injected somber lyricism into the 19-minute third movement, which manages to find salvaged beauty in the carnage and devastation. The final movement’s inevitable, Stalin-mandated victory may feel a shade forced, but neither Shostakovich nor Payare’s orchestra could have executed it better. Here’s one for any list of best 2024-25 performances.
If any justification were needed to program Camille Saint-Saens’ rarely performed fifth piano concerto known as Egyptian — or to invite virtuoso Jean-Yves Thibaudet to do it — it might be the unvexed contrast it offers to Shostakovich’s symphonic hellscape. Most obviously, there are the exotic touches that gave it its name: Nubian love songs and Gamelan and Spanish-guitar textures in the andante. Then there are the pianistic hurdles Saint-Saens baked into the score. They were, he boasted, “formidable: there are super-impositions of thirds to make one tremble.”
A seasoned virtuoso who (along with Pascal Rogé and Stephen Hough) has kept this concerto among the living, Thibaudet didn’t tremble a bit. To the concerto’s many notorious challenges — the accelerated chromatic runs and exotic scales at the andante’s opening, for example — Thibaudet brought economy of motion, controlled percussive force, expressive sensitivity, and a respect for Saint-Saen’s score.
Payare and the Symphony matched Thibaudet with skill and panache. This brilliant, frankly fun work should be on more programs.
Thibaudet’s encore was a charming Intermezzo No. 2 in A Major (Op. 118) by Johannes Brahms.
Paul S. Bodine has been writing about music for over 30 years for publications such as Classical Voice North America, Times of San Diego, Orange County Register, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Among the artists he’s interviewed are Joshua Bell, Herbert Blomstedt, Sarah Chang, Ivan Fischer, Bruno Canino, Christopher O’Reilly, Lindsay String Quartet, and Paul Chihara.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Review: Rafael Payare conducts Shostakovich’s massive ‘Leingrad’ with thrilling force )
Also on site :