IF JONATHAN Mills' festival theme, Artists Without Borders, has done one thing this year beyond presenting us with some interesting concerts and collaborations – and some timely political illustration in the Caucasus – it is to underline how many ar
tistic borders there still are.
Of course, these borders have kindled artistic imaginations for centuries, as the first
BUDAPEST FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA concert showed last Saturday. This 'pop classics' mix of gypsy-inspired music from the usual suspects, Brahms, Liszt et al, won't have been to every festivalgoer's taste, even with the intriguing addition of gypsy music by Józef Lendvay, a Roma violinist who normally plays in a fish restaurant in Budapest. But the evening was saved by the burnished and heady quality of the BFO playing, not least that of his classical virtuoso son, who ran loops around Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen and his delightfully OTT Paganini encore.
A rather less populist programme came on Tuesday morning at the Queen's Hall with soloists from the BFO attacking less well-known works by Hungarians Seiber and Dohnányi and Romanian Enescu. The early Seiber is an unflashy work that promises much but never quite delivers, but the Dohnányi Piano Quintet, with its dramatic scoring, busy strings and Romantic piano sweep, is played with passion by this impromptu ensemble.
The main event this week was Valery Gergiev with the Mariinsky Theatre that he single-handedly raised from the ashes of the post-Soviet era. Gergiev's politics have been outspoken in the last fortnight – he is Ossetian and a very patriotic Russian – but so too has been his music. The opera programme concluded with a worthwhile staging of Szymanowski's underrated
KROL ROGER, its plethora of styles contained in an inchoate three acts, laced with Eastern traces.
Marius Trelinski's production updates Szymanowski's tale of the mysterious Shepherd (Dionysus in disguise) who tempts King Roger to excess, transposing the 14th-century Sicilian-set action to a nondescript modernist industrial setting, its drab fascistic backdrop uncomfortably reminiscent of the horrors of Poland's, and indeed Russia's, 20th-century past. But Trelinski's production is a rather equivocal, if good-looking affair, concentrating more on hedonism than Szymanowski's struggles with his homosexuality. He still can't override the problems Szymanowski had in resolving the second and third acts.
Musically, however, the intense sound world gets a fiery champion in Gergiev; Pavlo Tolstoy's Shepherd is excellent, and the only disappointment is Elzbieta Szmytka's Queen Roxana, who fails to make magic of her pivotal hypnotic aria.
If the staged opera count has again been disappointing this year, Mills has chosen wisely when it comes to concert opera. The UK premiere of Rodion Shchedrin's
THE ENCHANTED WANDERER is a rare opera 'for the concert platform' taken from a story by Nikolai Leskov of a gypsy loved and left by a Prince whose servant Ivan is in her thrall. It's less opera, more a narrative, with its heart in its meditative score. And it works, if somewhat lengthily. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic in 2002, its high points are the moments of orchestral colour such as the vivid, humorous 'drunken night', Gergiev exploiting every furious climax, every subtlety, with Kristina Kapustinskaya absolutely superb in Grusha's heartrending gypsy lament.
In terms of furious climaxes, one couldn't have asked for more than the third act of Prokofiev's 'Soviet' opera
SEMYON KOTKO, performed by Gergiev in an enthralling Usher Hall concert. Prefaced by a luxuriant performance of Rachmaninov's
ALEKO, an adaptation of Pushkin's poem, The Gypsies, this was a blistering account of a dramatic act, set in 1918 when a small Ukranian town is terrorised by occupying German forces searching for partisans and revolutionaries.
Few will forget this breathtaking performance. The tension is furiously driven by Gergiev and the madness of a village girl, whose vocal motif becomes another driving layer of the orchestration in a towering performance by Irina Mataeva. In a week in which the uncomfortable resonances between art and politics, past and present, have been acute, Gergiev has triumphed.
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