Search - Rachmaninoff, Dutoit, Philadelphia Orchestra :: Rachmaninov: The Bells; Spring; Three Russian Songs [Australia]

DARKNESS AUDIBLE

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 06/08/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"If it makes sense to talk about doing gloom brilliantly then Russian composers do gloom brilliantly. This disc offers us a good hour's worth of fine frowning stuff from Rachmaninov, splendidly performed and in general, I'd say, well recorded. The sound at the start is in the middle distance rather than in the foreground, but turning the volume up a little helps, and even here the effect is perfectly satisfactory if one thinks in terms of how it might sound in the concert hall from a seat towards the back. As the disc progressed I fancied that matters improved in this respect, whether or not my impression was largely a matter of becoming accustomed to the acoustics. Where this recorded sound really scores with me is in conveying atmosphere. The impact is beautifully lugubrious, enhancing my sense of a fine, accomplished and thoroughly idiomatic set of renderings.



The words are not provided let alone translated, but the brief and anonymous liner note is actually rather a good one, telling us probably all that most of us want to know about the precise meaning of what is being sung in The Bells and Spring. These compositions seem to me not so much `settings' of texts as a kind of vocal tone-poem, with the music's programme incorporated verbally into the score rather than provided as background information in the manner of Strauss. The Bells is to an adaptation of Poe, depicting the four ages of man in a generalised and sombre idiom that slightly recalled to me the essay by the Russian tragedy-queen in one of the Hyman Kaplan books `Life, Death, what is they?' Spring is another vocal tone-poem, this time with no soloists, recounting the tale of a Russian peasant brooding through the depths of the Russian winter on his wife's infidelity, from which dark thoughts he is aroused by the coming of spring, but only relieved to a certain extent from the sound of it. It's rather a pity that the liner-note writer doesn't sketch in the meaning of at least the first two of the Three Russian Songs, but the general harmonics of these seem to be along the same lines as those of the foregoing pieces. The last of the three songs is a folk-song adaptation, and I have to admit that within the parameters of each national culture's folk-song idiom one tends to sound to me very much like the next.



The performances strike me as outstandingly good. The orchestra is of course the great Philadelphia, and the conductor is the admirable Dutoit. The chorus are just right for me, and I could almost see them all in fur hats. Absolutely superlative are the three vocal soloists, their tone grand and ringing and their technical accomplishment total.



`Come, divinest melancholy' says Milton in Il Penseroso. To use a commoner expression, it all works for me."