Critic’s Notebook: A Damp Squib with the Vienna Symphony

Also reviewed for Die Presse: Musikverein: Eine verpasste Chance mit den Wiener Symphonikern

D.Shostakovich, Violin Concerto Alina Ibragimova V.Jurowski / Russian State Academic SO hyperion

C.Debussy, La Mer (et al.) D.Gatti / ONdeFrance Sony

M.Ravel, La valse (et al.) S.Celibidache / MPhil MPhil Archive

Isabelle Faust’s Shostakovich could have been a major moment — but never got the support it needed

After a special evening at the with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (see review), it was back to meat-and-potatoes on Thursday. The ingredients sounded promising enough, for a concert with the Vienna Symphony in which Isabelle Faust would perform Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto. And she certainly wasn’t the problem: her contribution had the ears prick up, whether it was the plaintive, lamenting tone she drew from her instrument by way of strategically wide vibrato — penetrating and tender all at once — or her mercilessly instant, stone-faced gear-shift into an aggressively hard-edged sound. Even at moderate tempos, Faust managed to carry a good deal of precarious tension across from the Adagio of the second movement into the Adagio of the third. That wasn’t enough to save Shostakovich’s astringent late work, however.

And it’s not even that the VSO played badly. In fact, they played solidly enough, no major blunders, and conductor Alain Altinoglu at least seemed engaged and trying hard. But whether in the prelude to Khovanshchina (where the thin violin sound didn’t help), or in Debussy’s La Mer, the results were uniformly dull, the results were eye-wateringly boring: the sound was murky, the energy sluggish, the atmosphere in the hall unsettled. The orchestra sounded like it was on autopilot — as if this were just another rehearsal-free repertoire run-through over at the State Opera. Tremolos remained tremolos and never lifted off the strings, becoming a shimmering iridescence. Dynamic shadings felt merely mechanical. Any Fortissimo wasn’t majestic — just loud. Where mystery was called for, we got mezzo piano.

At least Ravel’s La Valse is more or less impossible to ruin. Here it stumbled along with the grace of a drunken elephant — which, after all, rather suits it. But the veil that had lowered between orchestra and audience — and somehow also between orchestra and conductor — never lifted again.


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