The Moscow Virtuosi is hardly the most polished group of international musicians but at its concert Monday at Symphony Center the occasionally suspect intonation and imperfectly coordinated attacks and releases seemed merely a byproduct of the ensemble’s obvious commitment to the music. Who wants to count wrong notes when the spirit is so manifestly present?
The group includes wind and brass players, but on this occasion conductor-violinist Vladimir Spivakov brought us a chamber symphony of 18 strings. Their playing style was Russian to the core, even when they were not playing Russian music. The audience included a large number of Russian-speaking listeners whose enthusiasm assured the visitors they were among friends. By the end of the evening, the audience refused to leave and Spivakov was only too happy to offer encore after encore.
The program was unusual in that only one piece, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s 1983 Prologue and Variations for String Orchestra, was presented in its original form. Russian musicians seldom play American music for American audiences, so this proved a pleasant surprise. Zwilich writes good agitated-rhythmic music and she writes good sustained-repetitive music, and she knows how to intercut them for maximum expressive contrast. Mildly dissonant in harmony without abandoning its tonal moorings, the Variations engages the ear with quirky, yet clear-cut, shifts of tempo and sonority.
Ernest Chausson’s Concerto for Violin, Piano and Strings made rather less convincing an effect. In its original guise, this is a disguised sonata for violin and piano, with string quartet accompaniment. Expanding the accompaniment to 18 strings, as Spivakov did here, didn’t enhance the music’s mauve late-Romanticism so much as smother its Gallic charms beneath a thick blanket of sonority. The soloists were oddly matched. Spivakov played with quick, intense vibrato, strait-laced in manner, while Alexander Korsantiya allowed his rhapsodic pianism to turn precious.
The second half was devoted to early and late Shostakovich, and it was no surprise that Spivakov and friends gave of their best in these selections. The Chamber Symphony, Opus 110a–Rudolf Barshai’s arrangement of the Shostakovich Quartet No. 8–gains the tonal weight of a string orchestra but loses something of the original work’s bitter irony, the sense of private soul-baring. No matter: Spivakov and friends attacked the score with steely concentration, effectively setting this late masterpiece against the young Dmitri’s acrid, nose-thumbing Two Pieces for Strings, Opus 11.
