Philharmonia
Marin Alsop
Royal Festival Hall, South Bank Centre
24 April 2025
Part of Multitudes (“An electrifying new arts festival powered by orchestral music”), this concert opened with Leonard Bernstein’s dramatic, colourful, passionate, reflective Chichester Psalms (1965). I was a student in Chichester when Dean Walter Hussey commissioned it for the cathedral and vividly remember the excitement in the city, especially when the composer came to Chichester to conduct it a year or two later. I have loved it dearly ever since and miss no opportunity to hear it. I was probably the only person in the audience at this concert there primarily for the Bernstein, which seemed unfamiliar to most of the audience, most of whom were apparently there for the second half.
It was especially interesting to hear Chichester Psalms conducted by Marin Alsop who was famously mentored by Bernstein and close to him. It took off with panache and the Philharmonia Chorus found electrifying precision in the cross rhythms. The second movement was lovingly lyrical as an unnamed boy treble (Instagram identifies him as Hugo Walkom) duetted with the harp. The child singer was nervous and a bit breathy at first but it settled after a few bars. I really admired the arresting tension in the third movement string playing. Moreover the Philharmonia Chorus solists did a grand job as did the cello quartet. It was, overall, a powerful performance of a splendid work.
And so to the evening’s main event: Dimitri Shostakovich’s tenth symphony accompanied by William Kentridge’s film “Oh To Believe in Another World”. Or should that be the other way round?. Well, silent film and live music is hardly a new idea but this collaboration seeks to put an innovative spin on it.
Dating from just after the death of Stalin in 1953, the tenth symphony is a pretty programmatic work expressing the composer’s pent up distress after years of trying to be creative within the Stalinist regime, of which he fell foul more than once. There’s a lot of anger in this symphony especially in the short, furious second movement – and only a tiny glimmer of hope for the future.
Now, I am probably not the best person to judge Kentridge’s imaginative filmic art, but personally I would have preferred to listen to the music without the film. As it was, the auditorium was in cinema style darkness with the orchestra almost invisible apart from their stand lights. And we were distracted from Shostakovich by actors, photographed heads, grotesque puppets, captions and inset contemporary footage unwinding, sort of, a visual narrative of mid 20th century Soviet Russia. Again and again we saw Shostakovich conducting with a red flag and lots of images of lamp shades (?) with pliers or other tools for heads to represent, I suppose, industry. We also saw a lot of Lenin and Shostakovich’s alleged lover among many other things. Sometimes they swapped heads. The visual movement was more or less synched with the music but that didn’t seem to be the point. If there was a point, frankly it passed me by, but the fault may lie with me and my ignorance rather than in the film.
Meanwhile the orchestra, relegated to atmospheric background music, soldiered on admirably. Highlights included the immaculate flute playing in the Allegro and a very unsettling account of the Allegretto with its relentless motiv – beautifully introduced by Philharmonia concert master, Zsolt-Tihamer Visontay, the sound of his violin clear, clean and elegantly sinister.
Phot0 credit: Pete Woodward.
