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Nick Kimberley's rating
Sudbin is in an altared state
By
Nick Kimberley
25 Jul 2008
The Russian pianist Yevgeny Sudbin delayed his wedding in order to make his Proms debut last night but if he was suffering pre-nup nerves, he kept them well hidden.
Sudbin has all the strength, brittleness and languor that Rachmaninov's music demands; if much of the First Piano Concerto is about hard muscle, the marvellously liquid tone that he produced in quieter passages showed his sense of fantasy in full flight.
The BBC Philharmonic under Yan Pascal Tortelier fulfilled the role of an adoring companion, agreeing with everything Sudbin had to say.
This was a thrilling start to a Proms cycle of Rachmaninov's concertos; the pianists who play the others have a hard act to follow.
The concert also marked the beginning of the Proms' tribute to Ralph Vaughan Williams, 50 years after his death. No work is better calculated to combat the charge of "cowpat pastoralism" than the Fourth Symphony. By turns violent and lyrical, raucous and irascible, it brought out the best, and sometimes the wildest, in the BBC Phil.
No high-gloss reading, and none the worse for that, the performance nevertheless had ample finesse, as in the diminuendo at the end of the first movement, and the long, slow crescendo that followed. As a preface to the mighty thump which brings the symphony to a jarring stop, Tortelier let out the loudest involuntary grunt I have ever heard from a conductor; he and his players had given their all.
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Reader views (2)
This was a quintessential Proms programme. The lesser-known Rachmaninov No 1, played with panache by a young Russian master, sandwiched between Arnold Bax's elegy for a martyr of the 1916 Easter rebellion, with its achingly tender melody, and the demonic, terrible power of the serious Vaughan Williams, all well-served by a conductor and orchestra stretching nerve and sinew in the service of music.
- Michael Simms, London, United Kingdom, 26/07/2008 00:17
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I couldn't disagree more with your reviewer about the Vaughan Williams 4th under Tortelier. His interpretation removed all the tension and anger from the Symphony and many of the Brass highlights sounded more like Sousa marches than angry and pained outbursts, while the totally strange and plodding tempo of the bulk of the rest of the Symphony sounded like a casual workthrough of the notes and not the passion of the music. Throughout there was a "plonking" tempo which totally spoilt this interpretation.
The fact that this dreadful interpretation still received 3 "curtain calls" was shocking, perhaps indicating how little most of the audience knew of this piece. Anyone who knows this piece from one of the stronger and more mature interpretations (eg Previn, Handley and most other recordings) will have been bitterly disappointed by an overmannered and staid performance.
Lets not mistake the histrionics of the conductor for a satisfying and emotionally effective interpretation and performance.
- Steve Gardner, New Milton, Hants, 25/07/2008 23:34
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