Photo credit: Torsten Kjellstrand, NPR
Taking over the stage for the final evening of this year’s
Spring for Music festival, Christoph Eschenbach led the National Symphony in an
all-Russian tribute to longtime music director and famed cellist Mstislav
Rostropovich—not only a pivotal player in the orchestra’s development, but an
international ambassador for delivering the music of 20th-century Russia to
Western audiences.
Comprising works of Rodion Shchedrin, Alfred Schnittke, and
Shostakovich, the program was a riveting account of the orchestra’s love for
their former conductor, beginning with Shchedrin’s Slava, Slava, written in 1997 to commemorate Rostropovich’s 70th birthday.
A brief and bright fanfare, the work had a sense of underlying menace and
foreboding, despite a full battery of gleaming hammered percussion.
The star of the evening was surely the young violist David
Aaron Carpenter, who gave a virtuosic account of Schnittke’s feverish Viola
Concerto. Ranging from Shostakovich-esque chorales to cryptic waltzes, the
concerto is a clear example of the composer’s unique orchestration, one that
included a large wind, brass, and percussion roster, piano and harpsichord, as
well as the absence of both violin sections.
Carpenter never failed to be heard
above the primal screams, maintaining a rich sound that was incredibly
expressive in the altissimo register and sang with well-paced vibrato. In the
work’s final moments, the solo viola hovered above the decaying orchestral
texture as a lonely figure displaced from the surrounding voices, weaving in
and out of quarter-tone sobs as the orchestra dispersed into vapor, culminating
in a chilling 10 seconds of silence before the audience leapt to their feet in
admiration.
Rounding out the program was Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony,
receiving a fresh account under Eschenbach’s tight control. The first
movement’s progression from funereal string melody to military cacophony was
expertly paced, and what the National Symphony lacked in terms of uniquely glorious
sound they more than made up for in rhythmic precision.
The string body gave an emotional account of the symphony’s
elegiac third movement, complemented by moving solos from the principal flute,
oboe, and clarinet, while the finale’s final moments were given the pompous and
deliberate pacing championed by Rostropovich during his tenure. Rather than
being seen as the individual's triumph in moving from darkness to light, Rostropovich
deemed the series of repeated, heavily pronounced A’s (251 of them) as the
hammering of nails in the coffin—a perfectly suited image, given the work’s
premiere at the height of the Stalin regime and the composer’s all-consuming
obsession with his own death.