NCH, Dublin
Prokofiev – Classical Symphony. Scriabin – Prometheus. Stravinsky – The Firebird.
What a programme! Alan Buribayevs second programme of his second season as principal conductor of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, given at the National Concert Hall, was an all-Russian affair, concentrating on three works premièred in what may well have been the most revolutionary decade in the history of music.
Stravinsky's Firebirdballet, a commission for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, was first heard in Paris in 1910. Scriabin was the piano soloist in the première of his Prometheus (Poem of Fire)in Moscow in March 1911. And Prokofiev conducted the first performance of his First Symphony, the Classical, in St Petersburg in April, 1918.
It was a pity that the rational playing order – the shortest work first, the longest one last – masked to an extent the stylistic cheek which Prokofiev’s symphony represents. It’s an out-of- the-blue retreat from the manners of the 20th century to those of the 18th, written with delectable wit and constituting a kind of high-wire act for the players – its apparent directness is anything but easy to bring off.
Buribayev's performance of it was the weakest link in an evening that moved from strength to strength. Scriabin's Prometheusis a work with a guaranteed place in the history book. It includes a part for an instrument identified in the score simply as Luce. What the composer had in mind was a colour organ, essentially a lighting control keyboard, notated in musical pitch, which was intended to bathe the performing venue in colours with specific associations – intense red for human will (the note C), bright blue or violet for creativity (G flat), orange for creative play (G), blue or pearly blue for contemplation (B), to give just a sample – mostly deployed two at a time.
Buribayev and the NSO took what was probably the wisest course, leaving the lighting to listeners imagination and concentrating on the hovering sonorities and flickering explosions of the music. The piano soloist, Alexander Toradze, integrated with and emerged from the orchestral textures rather than dominating with a concerto-like presence. Prometheusis a tantalisingly suggestive piece, which in this performance came across with a haunting quality of evanescent ecstasy.
Buribayev and his players hit top form in the evening's best-known work, Stravinsky's endlessly gorgeous Firebirdballet, the sustained concentration of their performance making every passing moment of this magical score glow with gem-like clarity and precision.
