Waterfront celebrations

{TABLE} Firebird Suite ........... Stravinsky Rococo variations ........ Tchaikovsky Symphony No 10 ........... Shostakovich {/TABLE} THE last of the St Petersburg Philharmonic's three concerts yesterday at the new Belfast Waterfront Hall offered the most varied programme.

Stravinsky's Firebird Suite (played in the familiar 1919 version, without the extra 10 minutes or so to be found in the more extended suite of 1945, which was the one billed in the programme), and Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony both offered abundant scope for the colouristic resources of this great orchestra to be revealed, and for individual players in the wind and brass sections to strike the ear with characterful solos.

The approach by conductor Yuri Temirkanov's to both pieces seemed cast in the most impressionistic and generalised of modes. He secured playing that was colourful and sonorous, to be sure, and easily surpassed at climaxes the weight of sound at the command of our local orchestras. But his music making was oddly low in tension, even in a super fast traversal of the second movement in the Shostakovich, which, as a result, became at times a bit of a scramble.

The high point of this final concert was the work conceived on the most intimate scale, Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme. The agile cello soloist here, playing the version prepared by the work's dedicatee Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, was Karine Georgian. She had both the agility and lyricism the music calls for and her presence seemed to spark the orchestral players into a sharper and more immediate style.