The String Orchestra Ensemble XXI Moscow ended a new festival, Russian Music Days in Dublin, at the National Concert Hall last Wednesday. The orchestra was founded with an international membership before the break-up of the Soviet Union by a Finnish violinist, Pia Siirala, and an Irish conductor, Lygia O'Riordan.
Ms O'Riordan is clearly a live-wire as an organiser. She's the musical director of several festivals - including Symphonies in Moscow Courtyards and the Moscow-Merimbula Festival in Australia - and has founded a John Field Society in Moscow, the city where the composer is buried.
As a conductor, she leaves me with nothing but ambivalent feelings. Under her direction, Ensemble XXI Moscow shows itself as an orchestra with unusual textural and timbral resources. Their string tone has, as it were, an intriguingly varied nap. The sound is mostly cushioned, the depth and spring cunningly varied so that the ear is always entertained.
But you can't base performances of Handel, Shostakovich, Rachmaninov or Tchaikovsky on the manipulation of tone and texture (I missed the opening Stravinsky due to car problems). The handling of all four composers showed undue rhythmic slackness, extraordinary linear eccentricities (stresses could occur in the most unusual places) and a consistent lack of harmonic purpose. These are failings which might have been redeemed if there had been some sort of compensating emotional thrust. But the playing was both chilled of heart and restrained in the expression of climaxes.
Soprano Ludmilla Shilova doesn't have the right sort of pinpoint accuracy for the bravura passages in the Handel arias she chose. Her Handel gave the impression that she would sound far more at home in the Romantics. And in Rachmaninov's Vocalise she momentarily gave the impression that the baroque would be her true field.
But the problems in the Rachmaninov weren't really hers. She chose to follow the composer's declared principle that any piece should have just a single moment of climax. Shilova worked towards it and delivered it with aplomb. But, on the journey there, the necessary warmth of harmony and openness of feeling, not to mention the basic necessity of sonic support, were simply not forthcoming from the orchestra. I've never before heard an orchestra deliver Rachmaninov's Vocalise with such a debilitating sense of winter chill.
