Aram KHACHATURIAN (1903-1978)Four Pieces from Spartacus [23:03]
Six Pieces from Gayane [18:20]
Maurice RAVEL (1875-1937)
Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2 [17:04]
St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra/Yuri Temirkanov
rec. December 2005 (Khachaturian), December 2010 (Ravel), Great Philharmonic Hall, St Petersburg, Russia
SIGNUM CLASSICS SIGCD310 [58:26]Yuri Temirkanov has spent half a century building a reputation as one of the great Russian conductors of his generation, and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic is an orchestra with a sonic identity so distinctive — that slightly dark, reedy string sound, woodwinds with a faintly archaic tang — that it ought to be the ideal ensemble for Khachaturian. The composer was, after all, a Soviet institution, and these musicians carry that tradition in their bones. So what happened here?
The Spartacus suite is where you notice it first. The “Variations of Aegina” arrive stiff, almost cautious, as if Temirkanov were reading the score rather than inhabiting it. Khachaturian’s ballet music lives or dies on a kind of barbaric, full-throated commitment — think of how Svetlanov used to throw himself at this repertoire, the Decca recordings with their almost reckless energy, or how Tjeknavorian found a ferocious middle path between speed and passion. Temirkanov’s “Adagio” from the same suite falls particularly short of those benchmarks. Svetlanov’s reading was long and frankly sensual, the melody allowed to breathe like something genuinely aching; Tjeknavorian pushed the tempo but compensated with an almost physical intensity. Temirkanov gives us neither heat nor time. What he does give us, throughout the Spartacus music, is a small, odd habit — brief hesitations inserted just before downbeats, micro-pauses so slight you can’t quite catch them consciously, only feel the music going slightly slack at moments when it should surge. Sand in the gears. The “Scene and Dance with Crotala” manages to stay afloat despite this, and the “Victory of Spartacus” finally catches fire. But one movement does not redeem a suite.
The Gayane excerpts bring fresh puzzles. Ayshe’s Dance has been severed from its preceding “Awakening” — that eerie, nocturnal introduction that gives the dance its meaning, its sense of something stirring out of darkness. Without it, the dance simply begins, and the dramatic logic evaporates. Then there is the matter of the melody itself. Anyone who has spent time with Khachaturian’s own Decca disc — those sessions from the 1960s with the Vienna Philharmonic, still among the most authoritative documents we have of how this music should sound — will remember that a particular solo line in Ayshe’s Dance is given to the saxophone, with exactly the right slightly veiled, plaintive color. Here it goes to flute. Flute is not wrong, exactly. It is simply different in a way that costs the passage something. The cuts don’t help either. The “Dance of the Rose Maidens,” to be fair, comes off well — supple, properly fragrant.
Then Daphnis et Chloé, Second Suite, following immediately on the “Sabre Dance.” The programming logic here defies me. Ravel’s music needs space around it, needs the listener to arrive at those shimmering dawn textures without the adrenaline of Khachaturian still rattling in the ears. The rendition itself is decent — a little drowsy at the edges, the way many conductors let the suite’s opening pages go soft when they should be building cumulative tension — and as almost always, you miss the wordless chorus, whose absence from the “Lever du jour” section is something of a permanent sorrow in concert performances. The St. Petersburg flute player, who has a magnificent instrument to play on, navigates the famous extended solo with only minor blemishes, which is more than can be said for some celebrated recordings. The timpanist makes mysterious appearances and disappearances in the final “Danse générale” that suggest either a score-reading problem or an inexplicable interpretive choice. Neither explanation is reassuring.
Temirkanov and his orchestra can do better. We know this because they have. This release belongs in that category of recordings you file under good intentions, inadequate results — disappointing precisely because the raw materials were so promising.
