It’s going to be a Terrible month. An Ivan the Terrible month, that is. Next week Covent Garden unearths Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride, in which Russia’s 16th-century despot shows his romantic side and steals his intended from the man to whom she is already bethrothed. Before that, however, the London Symphony Orchestra under Xian Zhang offered a fascinating opportunity to hear Prokofiev’s soundtrack to Eisenstein’s two monumental biopics of the ruler.
It’s certainly the loudest piece of music I’ve heard since ... well, since I last heard another piece by Prokofiev, the Scythian Suite. However, his music for the Ivan films was the most public face of the composer, trying to square the circle of Eisenstein’s new techniques and Stalin’s close personal interest in the subject. The concert suite formed out of the two film scores after the composer’s death is another compromise.
Zhang is a persuasive exponent of this hypercharged music, which could easily have turned mushy. Instead, she relished some of Prokofiev’s more startling orchestral combinations and kept the rhythms as crisp as possible; the LSO rattled, thundered and charged along to her precise beat. But Ivan the Terrible remains a frustrating concert experience: musically over-repetitive, but also dramatically diffuse. The London Symphony Chorus took the brunt of the loose plotline: they sang with gusto, but rarely with the coppery, Slavic weight to give such colourful lines as “on the funeral pyre of our enemies Russia is made into a united whole” their gruesome sting.
A narrator, the over-polite Rob Heaps, gave us some linking text that didn’t grip. And while Catherine Wyn-Rogers sang some of the more lyrical episodes with rich tone, the big regret was that this arrangement didn’t have anything more for Alexei Tanovitsky’s black-bottomed bass than one short, sharp scena that suddenly turned the temperature blood-red hot. Ultimately there’s a Tsar-shaped hole in this cooked-up cantata.
Earlier, Leila Josefowicz had offered us a very different side to Prokofiev in the winsome First Violin Concerto. She had a ropey start: wandering intonation marring the American violinist’s arrestingly dramatic phrasing and strong timbre. Once over that bump, a persistent cougher then practically killed off the rest of the first movement. But Josefowicz came back from the brink with a muscular, gritty scherzo and a strongly flavoured but still sensitive prance through the final movement’s diamantine hurdles.