Review: Rafael Payare conducts Shostakovich’s massive ‘Leingrad’ with thrilling force
Rafael Payare conducts the symphony Photo courtesy San Diego Symphony 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 R ckert Lieder and featured Mahler s Second and Third symphonies the latter coming weekend to bookend the symphony s - 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 at present 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 initiative 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 curriculum 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 -minute third movement which manages to find salvaged beauty in the carnage and devastation The final movement s inevitable Stalin-mandated preeminence 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 - performances If any justification were needed to scheme 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 The greater part 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 points They were he boasted formidable there are super-impositions of thirds to make one tremble A seasoned virtuoso who along with Pascal Rog and Stephen Hough has kept this concerto among the living Thibaudet didn t tremble a bit To the concerto s multiple notorious challenges the accelerated chromatic runs and exotic scales at the andante s opening for example Thibaudet brought commercial sector of motion controlled percussive force expressive sensitivity and a respect for Saint-Saen s result 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 in A Major Op by Johannes Brahms Paul S Bodine has been writing about music for over 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
