A throat singer, a theremin player, a choir and an orchestra often scraping the extremities are not usually found on the same platform. Playing rare Shostakovich, too. On novelty value alone, the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s presentation of Odna (Alone), the early Soviet sound film from Grigori Kozintsez and Leonid Trauberg, definitely rated attention.
But was this a concert or a film screening? If it had been a total success, pigeonholes would have been obliterated. Image or sound, the audience would have gone with the flow, sucked into the experiences of Yelena, the young Leningrad teacher sent to Siberia’s miserable far south to experience the joy of the first Five Year Plan and battle ancient customs and ignorance.
Yet outside a cinema auditorium with a pit, film and live accompaniment are very difficult to fuse, and Friday’s casualty, as usual, was the film (first shown in London in 1932, an infrequent visitor since). The sharp contrasts of black and white — pride and joy of the cameraman Andrei Moskvin, the only team member to enjoy the locations — were lost under the pink wash from the orchestra’s lighting. The worst sabotage was to the soundtrack: switched on to catch sound effects and spatterings of speech, switched off when it might have conflicted with the live orchestra.
A victorious night for the music, though — painstakingly reconstructed by the concert’s conductor, Mark Fitz-Gerald. In truth, Shostakovich’s inspiration flickers during the patchwork of cues, though even in the most doodling stretches the tart, often spare, instrumentation kept us listening. And the effects could be very telling: a snowstorm signalled by the theremin’s wail; a slippery trombone for the old-world village chief.
Gutsy playing and singing ensured that all the score’s details rang out, but too often swamping the images. Oh well: as Yelena discovered among the superstitions and sheep, it’s an imperfect world.