The chemistry between Amsterdam and Riccardo Chailly remains unmistakable. The welcome was warm on Wednesday evening for the Italian former chief conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Two years after his performance of Schoenberg’s more than monumental Gurre Lieder he is back in front of his old club. And once again the program is spectacular, with the cantata Alexander Nevsky by Sergei Prokofiev for orchestra, large choir and alto – preceded by the rarely heard Fourth Symphony.
The close-knit orchestral sound is immediately noticeable. Under Chailly’s baton, all instrument groups seem to bend their sound a little further towards each other. It rushes, it roars, it marches. A sense of subcutaneous detail seems self-evident. When the Netherlands Radio Choir and the Choir of Dutch National Opera join the orchestra in the cantata, the sound is complete.
Prokofiev’s piece leaves little to the imagination. Few ensembles have dared to touch it since the war in Ukraine began. The song lyrics express Russian nationalist sentiments particularly explicitly.
The composer composed the cantata in 1939 from his own film music Alexander Nevskya film by Sergei Eisenstein, steeped in state propaganda. The medieval title hero fights against an army of German crusaders, and bloodily chops the enemy to pieces. Film and music were popular with the Stalinist regime. Out the battle song Alexander Nevsky was heard frequently on Soviet radio during the Second World War.
Withdrawn from production
Vladimir Putin also likes to use the cantata as a propaganda tool. That causes inconvenience, also in The Concertgebouw. Singing the glory of the Russian people and homeland with great seriousness is not something you do lightly. A number of singers from the opera choir have therefore withdrawn from the production.
The Concertgebouw Orchestra is also aware of sensitivities. Surtitles and printed lyrics are omitted, “so as not to give the sung lyrics more emphasis than necessary,” as stated on the website and on loose sheets for visitors. The orchestra states: Alexander Nevsky to place it in a critical context and to judge it on its musical merits.
Those merits are undeniably there, absolutely. Prokofiev’s sound painting is so powerful that it tells the film plot almost independently – harsh dissonances in the brass for the enemy, stirring harmony on the Russian side. The battle on a frozen lake is downright nerve-wracking.
In two minds
Alto Marie-Nicole Lemieux fills in for Ekaterina Semenchuk, who has to miss out. Lemieux does not appear to be the better of the two – her vibrato is verbose and the vocal expression remains flat in the song about fallen soldiers on the death field (“With their deep red blood they have watered the earth, the honorable, Russian earth”).
Dying the good death for Russia, going to war in glory: by leaving those texts untranslated, it is as if the Concertgebouw Orchestra considers them too offensive. But they sound anyway, without the orchestra taking responsibility. Simply leaving them untranslated is different from providing critical context. And at Alexander Nevsky the music cannot be separated from the text (and the film).
In Concertgebouw magazine Prelude Riccardo Chailly states this week: “Great artists of the past such as Prokofiev and Shostakovich must be protected from any association with the contemporary Russian regime.”
The management of the Concertgebouw Orchestra seems to have a different opinion. Specially for the implementation of Alexander Nevsky free pins with the Ukrainian flag were made available to the musicians.
So the orchestra is in two minds. Offering beautiful music, but carefully concealing the content and background. That’s painful.
