Russian string ensembles wear their national identity as proudly as do Russian violinists and pianists. Thus, while the Moscow Virtuosi have taken up extended residencies in the West in recent years, their basic sound and style remain as Russian as beluga caviar.
The much-recorded, well-traveled string orchestra under violinist Vladimir Spivakov returned to Orchestra Hall on Sunday evening. The performances proved something of a mixed bag, even though everything was on the high technical level you would expect from so proficient a collective of soloists.
No conductor in any learned sense, Spivakov beat time efficiently and kept things moving smoothly, rather than asserting any interpretive ego.
How you responded to their concert-half of it devoted to Haydn concertos, the other half to Russian-Soviet works-depended to a great extent on how much leeway you were willing to grant Spivakov and friends in matters of style.
Wendy Warner, the talented Wilmette-born cellist who is a protege of Mstislav Rostropovich, played the Haydn D-Major Concerto with a glowing tone and ripeness of feeling her famous mentor might have envied. There were indulgent ritards, among other romantic touches, and Warner cushioned every phrase with greater warmth than most Haydn scholars would accept. But there were no purist pedants in the house, and Warner won all hearts.
Spivakov’s playing of the Haydn C-Major Violin Concerto was less convincing, although hardly less well played. He drew impassioned, fat-toned sounds from his instrument in the big Russian manner amid the Russian window-dressing of 17 strings and token harpsichord. Not much room here for Haydnesque charm.
In Vladimir Milman’s string orchestration of Shostakovich’s 1946 String Quartet No. 3-published as Chamber Symphony, Opus 73-bis-the composer’s private ironies take on a more public, and, for my taste, less disturbing character. The music is well worth hearing, however, and the Muscovites played it as if their lives depended on it. The final, dying fall of solo violin over the barely audible strings will long haunt the memory.
Spivakov also paid homage to two of the former Soviet Union’s most eminent living composers, the Estonian Arvo Part and the Muscovite Rodion Shchedrin.
Part’s “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten” is an eloquent minimalist threnody of muted strings over a steady, mournful chime. But to really make its effect this music needs a larger body of strings than Spivakov was able to provide; here the intensities seemed externally applied.
Shchedrin’s “Stalin Cocktail,” written in 1992 for the Moscow Virtuosi, is a frivolous little satirical collage (at one point Spivakov fiddles “Dark Eyes”) that ends literally with a howl of pain. Shostakovich-who suffered mightily under the Stalinist yoke-would have appreciated the gallows humor.
