Absolut(e) Musical Brilliance

One brilliant, sunny, cloudless fall morning in Warsaw a few years ago, an announcement came over the loudspeakers at the airport. The Lot Airlines flight to Newark could not depart until the fog lifted. Five hours later, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, which was booked on the flight, arrived; we were quickly hustled onto the plane and it took right off.

But not before the party began.

Once on the plane, the Russian musicians immediately brought out bottles of vodka and lighted up cigarettes, ignoring seat belt signs and warnings from crew.

Food soon followed; the players had picked up roasted chickens from somewhere. It was a raucous eight hours over the Atlantic. At their wits’ end, the flight attendants simply gave up and vanished. During the descent into Newark Airport, the musicians were already in the aisles getting out luggage. A violin fell from an open overhead bin as we landed with a thud, offering an uproarious moment of orchestral hilarity.

The next evening, at Carnegie Hall, Russia’s oldest and most elite orchestra--its players young and old, men and women--gave a magnificent concert of stirring, soulful Tchaikovsky.

Not much seems to have changed, given the news reports of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic’s carrying-on during the first leg of its flight from Amsterdam to Los Angeles on Monday, at the start of a monthlong tour. But this time, United Airlines, not amused by the vodka bottles and drunken behavior, threw the musicians off the plane when it landed at Washington’s Dulles Airport. The orchestra was not allowed to proceed to LAX, putting its concert Wednesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in jeopardy.

But after a night of sleeping it off, contrite St. Petersburgians flew to LAX on Tuesday. The orchestra offered a formal apology to the airline. And then, just as it did years ago in New York, the rowdy bunch put on a magnificent concert.

The orchestra’s antics did, however, throw an interesting light on the music and the Russian character.

The program Wednesday contained works by the three most famous Russian composers of the 20th century--Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich--written within an artistically stormy 20-year period.

It began and ended with the most popular 20th century Russian symphonies--Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony and Shostakovich’s Fifth. In between was Stravinsky’s rarely heard ballet “Song of the Nightingale.”

All three, it turns out, are works by young composers who had musically misbehaved and were making amends.

In 1917, Prokofiev produced a Haydn-esque charmer in the wake of his aggressively dissonant, hackles-raising Second Piano Concerto. Around the same time, Stravinsky, who four years earlier had caused music’s most famous riot with his downright barbaric “Rite of Spring,” wrote “The Song of the Nightingale” in a colorful, exotic style that looked back to his earlier ballet “Petrushka” and to the tradition of his mentor in St. Petersburg, Rimsky-Korsakov.

Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony represents the century’s most startling example of musical reparation. After a dangerous denunciation from Stalin for the “decadent,” sexually explicit opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” Shostakovich kept himself out of the gulag thanks to the triumphant, upbeat nature of his Fifth Symphony, which returned him, however uneasily, to Soviet good graces.

The Shostakovich symphony is in the St. Petersburg Philharmonic’s blood. It premiered the work in 1937 under Evgeny Mravinsky, one of the 20th century’s greatest conductors, who led the orchestra for 50 years. A recently reissued Everest recording by Mravinsky and the Leningrad Orchestra (as it was then called) of the symphony from the early ‘50s, shortly after Stalin’s death, is an excellent document of the almost unbelievable intensity the orchestra could produce with this score.

Yuri Temirkanov, music director of the orchestra since 1988, following Mravinsky’s death, has a somewhat different style, but the intensity is still there. Temirkanov, who is also music director of the Baltimore Symphony, loves to micromanage, which can make him seem fussy in some music, such as the Prokofiev symphony. But he loves thrust, which sweeps the listener along. When he can achieve both at the same time, as he did in the Shostakovich, the effect is riveting.

Details took hold, yet the orchestra played with gripping unanimity. The low string and brass instruments ground the ensemble with tremendous force.

In the slow movement, the quiet passages were taut whispers, an amazing amount of expressivity found from a thin wire of sound. This is in fact an orchestra that can fly sober, and the momentum throughout the symphony was astounding; everything in the score seeming inevitable.

Stravinsky’s ballet got a brightly colored, carefully tinted performance.

As an encore, “Tybalt’s Death,” from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,” was an irresistible display of orchestral virtuosity--fast, furious and spectacularly percussive.

Let them have their vodka; they earn it the hard way.