OVERNIGHT. Symphony.


St. Petersburg Philharmonic Somewhat Uneven

October 26, 1993|By John von Rhein, Tribune Music Critic.

Now that the Soviet Union has receded into history, the musical traditions that have long sustained Russia's oldest orchestra, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, remain.

The Russians put several of those traditions on display at their concert Sunday night at Orchestra Hall, beginning with their choice of music. The conservative program, led by music director Yuri Temirkanov, ignored the Tchaikovsky centennial in favor of a mostly Rachmaninoff program, including "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" and the Symphony No. 2.

Hearing the Russian orchestra only two nights after hearing the Berlin Philharmonic in the same hall afforded some interesting, and odious, comparisons.

If one of the Berlin's central glories lies in its beautifully homogenized sound, the St. Petersburg fairly revels in the different timbres that combine to produce its sound. Chief among them is its deep, dark, plangently Russian brass.

By comparison, Temirkanov's strings sounded somewhat thin (or perhaps it was simply that the brass smothered them), and the woodwind choir rather ordinary for an orchestra generally considered world-class.

Without dragging the comparisons too far, one also had to concede that the kind of sterling corporate virtuosity the Berliners displayed last weekend was not the Russians' to command. Their fervent embrace of their native music, their natural feeling for rubato, well suited the Rachmaninoff symphony, even if their sound was sometimes raw. Out-of-tune trumpets also were a nagging problem.

All was emphatically not lost, however, thanks to Dmitri Alexeev's biting and brilliant account of the Paganini Rhapsody. The pianist tore through the bravura pages like a supercharged demon, seconded with comparable intensity by his orchestra colleagues. But he also tapped a vein of genuine Slavic sentiment in the Hollywood schmaltz of the 18th variation.

One's pleasure at hearing an authentic reading of the Rachmaninoff symphony was not undiluted.

Temirkanov's dividing his violins across the podium (the basses were gathered in a cluster to the northwest of the podium) paid dividends in the dancing dialogue effects of the scherzo. And his resilient sense of line, rhythm and color burrowed deeply into the music's Russian soul.

On the other hand, his relatively fast pacing of the outer movements drove rather brusquely over too many crucial local details, while the famous clarinet solo in the slow movement was compromised by a nasal tone.

One can understand his failure to observe the first-movement exposition repeat, but not his decision to take disfiguring cuts in the score. Some Russian traditions plainly die hard.

The program began with the atmospheric prelude to Rimsky-Korsakov's "The Invisible City of Kitezh" and ended with "Nimrod" from Elgar's "Enigma" Variations, an unexpected encore, nobly intoned.