Vladimir Spivakov leads the Moscow Virtuosi.
Moscow Virtuosi At Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto on Thursday
The enforced cultural isolation of the Soviet Union crippled the country's creative life, but had some results that performers in other countries might envy. Seven decades of studying at the same schools with the same teachers gave musicians in Soviet orchestras a uniquely unified sound and approach.
Several players in the Moscow Virtuosi were children when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russian musicians could travel more or less freely. But when the orchestra began its concert at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall, it sounded almost as if the old order had never ended.
That seemed especially true in Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony Op. 110a - the orchestral arrangement of the String Quartet No. 8 made by Rudolf Barshai, the former Vancouver Symphony Orchestra music director who died two weeks ago. This dark masterpiece unfolded as if it were being played by one organism with many hands. Beyond the homogeneity of sound and attack, you could tell that the orchestra was playing out a part of its birthright so deeply ingrained that Vladimir Spivakov's minimal gestures seemed less like conducting than the observance of a necessary formality. A few spots felt a little overdeliberate, but that seems unavoidable in this arrangement, which for that reason has never, for me, had the emotional wallop you get from a good reading of the quartet.
Spivakov took up his violin for the other Russian piece on the program, Alfred Schnittke's Sonata No. 1 for violin, harpsichord and chamber orchestra. Schnittke's knotty, eclectic modernism has a way of making orderly systems sound sinister (in the bits of fugue that kept breaking out in the first movement, for instance). Much of the sonata breathed an air of sarcastic restraint, but in the slow movement, Schnittke's tragic lyricism and Spivakov's free and eloquent playing briefly broke through to something unguarded and genuinely touching. Unfortunately, the harpsichord was often inaudible from my seat in the mezzanine.
The show opened with Boccherini's zesty Symphony No. 4 in D Minor, which the orchestra played pretty much as a showpiece of steel-spun precision, without conceding much of its preference for a kind of feathery bow-work that you don't hear much any more in this repertoire in this part of the world. The fiercely dramatic finale could have had more bite, though the reedy sul ponticello effects were a nice touch.
Pianist Alexander Ghindin appeared for Mozart's Concerto No. 9 in E Flat, which he seemed to regard as a mainly technical enterprise, and not a very interesting one at that. Whole sections of the piece seemed to ripple by on autopilot, decorated with gauchely formed trills that had as much expressive meaning as a doorbell. I kept wondering what piece this obviously talented man would rather be playing. As soon as the concerto ended, we found out, in a pair of solo encores: a finger-popping fantasia on the Largo al Factotum from Rossini's The Barber of Seville; and a jazz-inflected version of Mozart's Turkish March.
It took little persuading by the mostly Russian audience for Spivakov to serve out his own encores with the orchestra, in short pieces by Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Piazzolla. Each was delicious in its own way, though all suffered, like the rest of the program, from the size of the venue. Thomson Hall is just too big for an orchestra like this.