Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, 19 April 2024. 5✩✩✩✩✩ Review: William Ruff.

Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, 19 April 2024.

5✩✩✩✩✩ Review: William Ruff.

“An exhilarating ride through 60 turbulent years of Russian music.”

Maria Ioudenitch had an electrifying effect on Friday’s audience. Her performance brought many people to their feet to cheer and applaud – but what she played wasn’t one of the well-known romantic favourites. It was something altogether spikier and dangerous: Shostakovich’s 1st Violin Concerto, a work born in the darkest days of Soviet Russia, days when composers could have ‘disappeared’ for writing something which disobeyed so blatantly the Party’s decrees.

It's hard to think of another concerto which makes such apparently unreasonable demands on its soloist. It’s on a symphonic scale, unusually in four movements, and the soloist has to play almost continuously. In fact, the violinist for whom it was originally written in 1948 begged Shostakovich for just a few bars rest so that he could wipe the sweat from his face. It’s a piece which makes every sort of technical demand as well as wrenching every last drop of emotion from its soloist.

It starts darkly with a slow, brooding, mysterious Nocturne, moves to a prickly, demonic Scherzo, then to a heart-stoppingly moving Passacaglia – and finally to the Burlesque finale, the sort of movement which lives in the tension between exhilaration and nightmare. Maria Ioudenitch totally identified with each facet of this psycho-musical journey, through music that was both beautiful and full of menace. No wonder the audience stood and cheered.

The concert started with Shostakovich’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Prelude to his last opera Khovanschina. It’s a miniature tone poem depicting dawn over the Moscow River, complete with early morning church services, cocks crowing, guards patrolling and the sun rising on the onion-domed cathedrals in Red Square. The Dresden Philharmonic produced some lovely sounds, conductor Stanislav Kochanovsky careful to allow each visual detail to emerge from the music, especially at the end when the music dissolves like the mist from the river.

And finally came Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony, the Pathétique, not only one of the most searingly emotional works in the repertoire but one forever associated with the composer’s death – just a few days after he had conducted its premiere. It’s a work of extremes and unusually makes a journey not from the usual darkness to light, but from gloom to an even profounder darkness out of which death stares us in the face. It’s a symphony which requires virtuosic playing from all sections of the orchestra, as well as the whole ensemble being minutely responsive to the often wild fluctuations of the music. The Dresden Philharmonic clearly has this music flowing through its veins and Stanislav Kochanovsky was able to produce maximum emotional impact through his care for the fine detail of dynamics (often extreme) and to symphonic structures which seem to grow from the composer’s own troubled life. Unsurprisingly the audience roared their approval.

Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra

Stanislav Kochanovsky (conductor), Maria Ioudenitch (violin)