{TABLE} Polonaise from Eugene Onegin .............. Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No 1 ....................... Tchaikovsky Symphony No 5 ............................. Tchaikovsky {/TABLE} THE new Belfast Waterfront Hall is celebrating its second weekend in style, with three concerts from one of the world's great orchestras, the St Petersburg Philharmonic under Yuri Temirkanov, who is conducting three of the Belfast programmes, an all Tchaikovsky night, an all Rachmaninov night, and an afternoon of Tchaikovsky Stravinsky and Shostakovich.
I listened to the opening Tchaikovsky programme not from one of the side areas (where I was seated for the Ulster Orchestra concert last week) but from a frontal position, in the back row of the Lower Terrace, Block F.
Under Temirkanov, the St Petersburg Orchestra is a smoother, tamer ensemble than was heard in Dublin 10 years ago at the National Concert Hall (then as the Leningard Philharmonic and under its legendary long time conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky) and here played without an emotional wildness often heard on recordings under its old master.
It is, of course, an orchestra that must know its way blindfold through the major works of Tchaikovsky and, for most of the evening, there was to the music making an easy familiarity for which the word autopilot springs uncomfortably quickly to mind.
I couldn't help wondering if the almost veiled quality of sound I experienced might not have been the result of being seated under an overhang, and if this might not also explain some of the consistent quirks of balance strings (extraordinarily rich double basses and unusually light cellos) masking woodwind, both in turn being masked by the louder brass, and with real internal clarity being achieved only at lower dynamic levels.
The balances didn't make things easy for the soloist in the Piano Concerto, Mikhail Rudy, whose impressively chiselled playing didn't always cut through heavily scored passages, yet who seemed 10 find it hard to scale down for more chamber like moments.
Balance and blend began to improve during the Fifth Symphony in the second half, but the thrills that might be expected of a great Russian orchestra in full flight were never quite manifest. However, what had been shaping up as an evening that would be notable for an unexpected sense of reserve was transformed by an encore from The Nutcracker. Here, with rippling harps, gorgeously but judiciously massive string tone and perfectly proportioned balances, was playing that had poise, point and heart wrenching clout. Spinetingling stuff. And, apart from the intrusion of public address announcements (twice!) there wasn't even a momentary whiff of anything as mundane as an acoustic problem.
