Coincidentally or not, the programme that Valery Gergiev and the Philharmonia brought to Symphony Hall and to London's Festival Hall this week provided useful trailers for the Russian conductor's forthcoming ventures. The overture to Glinka's A Life for the Tsar anticipated the performance of the complete opera that Gergiev and the Kirov Opera will give at the Festival Hall in four weeks' time, while anyone who was bowled over by his account of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony can buy his new recording for Philips, due in the shops next month.
It would have been hard not to be impressed by the remorseless way with which Gergiev presented the vast canvas of the Shostakovich, and by the utterly secure playing and huge dynamic range that the Philharmonia, reinforced with an extra brass choir, brought to it. Even they, though, could not make it into a convincing symphonic whole. Whoever timed the sprawling work at 63 minutes, as printed in the programme, must have been thinking wishfully.
It may be Shostakovich's longest symphony, but to my ears, at least, it is the weakest of the mature examples, especially if the Ninth, more divertimento than symphony, is excluded from the list. The thematic material lacks distinction and the composer's characteristic acerbity; an aspiring string line towards the end of the first movement sounds alarmingly like Prokofiev, and much in the remaining movements seems like the generic product of Soviet socialist realism.
In some ways, of course, that is what the Seventh is meant to be. The composer's dedication of the score to the city of Leningrad, where he wrote it during the German siege of 1941, presupposes a public statement, and accordingly the work became hugely popular during the second world war. In his finest achievements, Shostakovich managed to transcend those kind of commonplace imperatives. But here he does not, and hard though Gergiev and the orchestra worked to make the piece's seriousness and architectural coherence convincing, it was finally beyond even their powers.
Between the sprightly Glinka overture and the symphony, the young Russian pianist Alex Slobodyanik was the soloist in Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The tempi were fast and the fingers were dazzling, but the overall effect was edgy and shallow- toned, with little suggestion of the darker undercurrents that swirl through the set of variations.
