Alexander Lazarev has spent the past week with the Philharmonia conducting a pair of concerts that surveyed Russian music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The primary aim was to place the little-known alongside the familiar. Medtner's First Piano Concerto accordingly dominated the first concert, Glazunov's Fifth Symphony the second. Both composers, significantly, looked outside Russia for their influences. The model for Medtner's First Concerto is clearly Liszt's B Minor Sonata, with its extended single movement structure and its evolving thematic material. Glazunov's Fifth, meanwhile, sounds Germanic with its references to Wagner, Mendelssohn and Schumann.
Both works were given powerhouse performances, though whether either deserves a place in the regular repertoire is debatable. The soloist in Medtner's Concerto was Boris Berezovsky, technically electrifying and searchingly assertive in expression. Even he, however, couldn't quite disguise the lack of thematic inspiration in the score. Glazunov's Fifth, meanwhile, was all blazing brass, coruscating woodwind and slinky strings. The finale, with its brass band whoops, pre-empts Shostakovich and had everyone on the edge of their seats. But the symphony itself suffers from stylistic disunity. There is a case to be made for Glazunov, though he wrote better music than this.
The best-known work in the series, meanwhile, was Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, though it received a somewhat strange performance. Lazarev took it at one hell of a lick, while Berezovsky flung out octaves and cadenzas like machine gun fire. There was a spectacular account of Borodin's Second Symphony, during which Lazarev, ever the showman, spent much of the time in orbit, then pirouetted round to face the audience on the final, crunching chord. Stravinsky also featured, with a couple of lubricious Chopin arrangements, and the Divertimento from his Tchaikovsky-inspired ballet The Fairy's Kiss. Lean, erotic and at times very sinister, the latter is one of his greatest scores. Lazarev's performance was a model of clarity, sexiness and sinewy virtuosity.
