Irina KRIKUNOVA
Yevgeny AKIMOV
Egils SILIŅŠ – bass-baritone
State Academic Choir “Latvija” – choir
Conductor Andris POGA
Programme:
Dmitri SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No. 13 Бабий Яр
Sergei RACHMANINOFF – Choral Symphony “The Bells”
The pealing bells of St Sophia’s Cathedral in Novgorod were one of the most powerful impressions of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s childhood, and they can be heard in the choral symphony “The Bells”, whose grand and beautiful score weaves together both the happy blue skies of spring and a blanket of dark grey cloud. Beside it – Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s weighty portrait of the Soviet era in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, with reflections of the tragedy of the Second World War and sketches from the reality of post-war Soviet life.
The LNSO will be joined by the State Academic Choir “Latvija”. The full mixed-choir forces will ring out on a magnificent scale in Rachmaninoff’s “The Bells”, while the choir’s male voices will grace the performance of the Shostakovich symphony. Irina Krikunova and the Mariinsky Theatre tenor Yevgeny Akimov are the soloists in Rachmaninoff’s choral symphony, and Egils Siliņš sings solo in both of the large-scale works on this programme.
Andris Poga has placed two heavyweight masterpieces in a single programme. Exactly half a century separates the times of their composition. After Rachmaninoff wrote “The Bells” came two world wars and a complete change in the world order – relations between the classes of society, ideas about economics, artistic paradigms and much else besides. Around the time of the Second World War modernism flourished in music and the Romantics were reckoned all but backward, yet despite that challenging diagnosis there were outstanding composers among them too, including both of the masters featured in the programme of “Pearls of Russian Music III”.
Rachmaninoff(1873–1943), in his choral symphony of 1913, speaks with Romantic fervour of eternal things (unlike social systems and ideas about art, human beings do not change). The bell rings in the beginning of a life, a wedding and the passing into eternity.
Shostakovich(1906–1975), in the dramatic, irony-filled musical language so characteristic of him, lays open the atmosphere of the Soviet Union of the 1960s in his Symphony No. 13 (1962), setting poetry by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932) whose publisher was dismissed from his post on the spot. Today Yevtushenko’s work is judged in many different ways, and the master’s taste for calculated self-display cannot be denied, yet in his time he had a fine feel for the raw nerves of the life around him and, weaving them deftly into agile verse, knew how to amass a considerable capital of popularity.
The first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 tells of the tragedy of Babi Yar – the many thousands of people, most of them Jews, shot during the Second World War in the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv. The four remaining movements look at the unbreakable, indomitable nature of humour, at exhausted Soviet women shopping in a Soviet store, at fears that fade and new fears that come with the passing of the age, and finally at career – both in the petty careerist sense and in the noble one (“I make my career by not making one”).
The “Pre-concert Talk”guest is the culture scholar Sergejs Kruks, in conversation with Orests Silabriedis about Yevtushenko’s charisma and Shostakovich’s fears, the phenomenon of humour, careerism in the Soviet era and women in the gastronoms.