Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade – Temirkanov

Sultan Shahriar never quite learned his lesson, and neither, apparently, has the recording industry. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade keeps arriving on disc with the regularity of the tides, and most of these versions vanish without a trace. This one shouldn’t.

Yuri Temirkanov has lived with this orchestra, and with this score, for the better part of half a century. He inherited the St. Petersburg Philharmonic’s podium from Mravinsky in 1988, and inherited with it an orchestral sound that has nothing to do with the polished, interchangeable virtuosity of American ensembles. This band still growls and glows in ways that feel handmade. You hear it in the low brass at the start, blunt and unglamorous, more sea-monster than fairy tale. You hear it in the winds, which color rather than blend. Rimsky orchestrated as if he had x-ray vision into every instrument’s soul, and this orchestra plays as though the ink were still wet.

What strikes me most is the rubato. Temirkanov takes liberties that would get a lesser maestro an angry note from the concertmaster. He lingers. He surges. Some phrases practically stop breathing before they resume, as if Scheherazade herself were pausing mid-sentence to gauge whether the Sultan’s patience will hold one more night. It shouldn’t work, not with an orchestra this large, not in music this often played on autopilot. It works because the players seem to feel the pull coming before the baton asks for it. Decades of shared instinct, not rehearsal-room compliance.

The solo violin, Scheherazade’s own voice weaving in and out of the orchestral fabric from the first movement to the last, is exquisitely turned, full of small hesitations and sudden tenderness. And here I have a complaint that has nothing to do with the playing. Whoever engineered this release declines to tell us who the soloist is. Unconscionable, really: this is a reading worthy of a name, and the annotator has denied the player one. The balance engineers haven’t done this violinist many favors either. In climactic passages the solo line recedes into the orchestral haze in a way that would read perfectly well from a seat in the hall, where the eye supplies what the ear alone cannot, but on disc it needed a touch more presence in the mix. A small complaint, but a real one.

We learn only belatedly that this is a live recording at all. Applause erupts at the close of the finale, catching the listener rather by surprise, so seamless and controlled is everything preceding it. No coughs, no untidy edits, no audible rustling. If this is what St. Petersburg audiences hear on a given evening, they are spoiled rotten.

Preceding the Scheherazade, and this is where my enthusiasm curdles a little, are excerpts from The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, Rimsky’s strange, mystical late opera, the one Stravinsky’s generation found embarrassingly devout and which has only slowly clawed its way back into esteem. The suite drawn from it is usually heard in four movements, the last depicting the city’s final vanishing into the lake, transfigured and inaudible to mortal ears. It is an extraordinary passage, hushed and otherworldly, the perfect pendant to the “Battle of Kerzhenets” that precedes it. Here we get only three movements. The “Battle,” with its galloping Tatar hordes and pounding brass, comes off thrillingly, visceral, almost violent, and then the whole thing simply stops. No transfiguration, no vanishing city, no resolution. It’s like being shown a magnificent sunset and having someone switch off the lights before the color fades. Baffling, and unnecessary.

Still, measure this disc against the field. Against Reiner’s 1960 Chicago release, with its unmatched clarity and Sidney Harth’s silvery solo violin. Against Beecham’s old mono account, all wit and perfume. Against Ashkenazy, against Svetlanov, against the countless well-drilled versions that get every note right and nothing else. Temirkanov’s belongs in that company for its sheer idiomatic conviction. This is Rimsky-Korsakov played by people who have Rimsky-Korsakov in their blood, not merely on their stands. The truncated Kitezh is a real disappointment, a genuine and puzzling editorial failure. But the Scheherazade alone justifies the purchase: a shimmering, unpredictable, deeply personal traversal of a warhorse that, in these hands, sounds newly minted. Get it for that, and forgive the rest.