Gergiev Opens Window on Russia

Although it has adapted some of our politics, Russia has hardly become like us. For reasons why the country seems in such anguish at a time when we may have expected to find it exalting in a new-found freedom, we can study its history and government, comb through its great literature, pay close attention to its dark and deep films, get to know its complex people. But I also suggest a trip to the Los Angeles Philharmonic to hear Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky conducted by Valery Gergiev.

Both composers wrote music that modeled itself closely on the European methods--some Russian nationalists once felt far too closely. Both composers, moreover, were profoundly out of step with the Russian moral or political status quo of their times. Tchaikovsky was so tortured by his closet homosexuality that musicologists now suspect he committed suicide over it. Shostakovich was so oppressed by Stalin’s scary artistic policies that a rage and wretchedness seems at the bottom of just about every note he put on the page.

Yet however Westernized the forms and musical techniques they used, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky wrote music that is unmistakably Russian and about Russia. And there is no conductor more Russian than Gergiev, principal conductor and artistic director of the Kirov Opera in St. Petersburg, who began his two-week stint with the Philharmonic Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Shostakovich wrote his Second Violin Concerto late in life, eight years before his death and long after the death of Stalin. By 1967, when it was premiered, he had become something of a national icon, if still a controversial one. But there is little contentment in it. Shostakovich used the violin, as a lonely and solitary voice, and he also used it for violence, the sharp sound of the bow brutally attacking the strings. It evokes a lifetime of war and political oppression, and participates in Russia’s long tradition of sad songs.

The Philharmonic plays Shostakovich’s symphonies and concertos with some frequency, but it has something special to offer with this particular concerto. The soloist is the orchestra’s Russian concertmaster, Alexander Treger, who happened to be a 19-year-old studying in Moscow with David Oistrakh just at the time Shostakovich wrote the concerto for the legendary Russian violinist. This is music Treger clearly has in his bones and blood. He understands it is not always nice music, and his tone has the kind of edge Oistrakh’s could have, although Treger did seem to need a movement to smooth out intonation.

More important, Treger understands the ways that the concerto is virtuosic music without being showy music and that to make its tortured qualities effective you don’t torture the audience. Indeed, at times Treger could be surprisingly understated, but the power of intense expression was always there.

Gergiev himself is the most intense and unflinching Shostakovich conductor I have ever heard, but he too remained uncharacteristically restrained but always supportive in his accompaniment of Treger. He saved the excitement for Tchaikovsky’s “Manfred” Symphony in a performance that revealed why his very presence here for two subscription programs is enough for the Philharmonic to call it a Gergiev festival.

“Manfred,” a loud and stormy hourlong symphonic poem based on Byron’s epic, is different from and less popular than Tchaikovsky’s six numbered symphonies. Tchaikovsky did, however, clearly identify with Byron’s sexually tormented protagonist, and he poured some of his most inventive and personal music into the symphony. The work may not hang together perfectly, but it does make an extraordinary sound.

That emphasis of distinctive and descriptive sound over symphonic logic is part of what separates Tchaikovsky’s music from its European counterparts, and it is something Gergiev captures with great power. He tends to build an orchestral tone from the bottom up, achieving a richness and depth that has become his trademark.

As a result, the Philharmonic sounded transformed from its usual gleaming tone to something altogether darker and more expressive, and the playing under Gergiev seared with such intensity that the usually restrained and sophisticated Thursday night subscription crowd applauded after every movement. That is not tradition in symphony concerts, an etiquette that confuses new listeners. But it is the unmistakable authority of this very important conductor to make new listeners of us all.

* Valery Gergiev repeats his program with the Los Angeles Philharmonic tonight at 8, Sunday at 2:30 p.m. and Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tickets are $8-$60. Information: (213) 850-2000.