Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra - Guild Hall, Preston - 19/05/09
Three Russians, each in his own way with a traveller's tale to tell – it was an agreeable odyssey to conclude this year's Preston concert series by the Liverpool Phil.
An agreeably-sized audience, too, at the Guild Hall even if the Phil didn't quite make the journey as consistently absorbing as it might have been, given the many memorable moments it has regularly provided over the past season.
First leg was In The Steppes Of Central Asia, Borodin's camel caravan escorted by Russian soldiers moving across the vast plains and pulled along by his sinuously sure-footed (and famous) tune.
In the hands of the Phil's dapper young guest conductor Alexander Shelley it was an almost dreamlike vision glimpsed at a long distance but powerfully evocative.
Rachmaninov, on the other hand, didn't travel well. "I feel like a ghost in a world grown alien," he wrote from his US exile after his uprooting by the 1917 Russian Revolution. His anxiety-strewn Piano Concerto No 4 came after a long period of creative block in the 1920s and he later cut it heavily, betraying his unease at being out of tune with the times.
His customary expansive, elegant tunes are curtailed – it's a work that seems scared of being caught in evening dress in the middle of the block for fear of scorn.
The excellent Uzbek-born pianist Eldar Nebolsin admirably rounded up its skittering melodic elements and residual romanticism, if at the expense of its more evanescent moments. And the Phil's brass perhaps obscured the striving string themes – landmark Rachmaninov – of the final movement.
Final stretch was given to Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade, his rich evocation of the Arabian Nights. Beguiling individual playing from the Phil soloists but it was in the final movement that the orchestra finally cleared the carburettor and surged home.
Trevor Willis
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Friday 10 February 2012
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