GLASGOW, Saturday night, and a blistering set of Shostakovich performances from the RSNO. It could mean only one thing: Lazarev was back in town.
There were so many RSNO Shostakovich performances in Scotland in the past decade, while Alexander Lazarev was principal conductor, that the orchestra can be forgiven for not having undertaken (so far) a major survey of the music of the Russian master in this centenary year of his birth. It does mean, however, that this season, Scottish audiences, which are addicted to Russian symphonic music, have been relatively starved.
Appetites were more than sated on Saturday when Lazarev, in his first official concert as conductor emeritus, led the orchestra in characteristic style, eliciting from players a set of performances that were decisive, incisive, rivetingly authoritative and gripping.
Even the relatively minor symphonic poem October seemed packed with the resonance and significance of one of the big symphonies: that's pure Lazarev. Nothing is minor or incidental in his hands. Likewise with the composer's superior film music for Hamlet, which was astoundingly dramatic in this version.
But the core of the concert, and a molten core, too, was the scorchingly soulful performance by Dmitri Makhtin of the Second Violin Concerto, a darkly intimate work, here stripped to the bone by the stunning violinist and Lazarev, and a performance of the Ninth Symphony that made the work sound bigger-boned, more waspish and with greater profundity than it can appear to possess.
String playing was here and there a bit scratchy: Lazarev sometimes seems to let the fine detail go by the board. But it was good to hear the heavy team, and they are seriously heavy, back in action again.
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