It felt as though war and peace were locked in a battle for the very soul of this concert of Russian and Ukrainian music, a savage reminder three years on of the brutal invasion of one country by the other.
Things got off to an inauspicious start. Even conductor emeritus Vladimir Jurowski’s powers of persuasion couldn’t disguise the fact that Semyon Kotko is second-rate Sergei Prokofiev. Set in rural Ukraine, his 1940 opera ran into difficulties from the start: after Stalin and Hitler signed their notorious non-aggression treaty, a drama filled with marauding hordes of German invaders was distinctly on the nose. An orchestral suite was the composer’s way of getting some of it heard, but for all his evident warmth for the Ukrainian countryside (Prokofiev grew up in Donetsk), the inspiration struggles to rise above the commonplace. The most original movement here featured a garish execution sequence with more than a whiff of the firing squad about it.
Matthew Rose’s spook-haunted reading of Modest Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death was in another league, his Stygian bass and razor-sharp diction cutting a swathe through Edison Denisov’s vivid orchestrations. Clad in funereal black, hands drooping at his sides, Rose appeared every inch the grim reaper (though rather glued to his sheet music). With lugubrious visage, he nailed each song, whether crooning a lullaby to dupe the mother of a dying child, cavorting in the snow with a drunken peasant, or trampling on the bones of the fallen.
Ukrainian composer Boris Lyatoshynsky’s tempest-tossed third symphony – rarely heard abroad – was written in 1951. Nevertheless, it seems like a wartime work with three turbulent movements capped by a finale with the epithet “Peace shall defeat war”. Jurowski and the LPO’s convincing account ran the gamut from militaristic menace in the alarm-filled opening movement to a nocturnal andante, where rippling flutes over tender violin pizzicatos proved too good to last. The slaughterhouse scherzo juddered along in pitiless waltz time before the finale powered full-pelt to a percussion-fuelled conclusion.
