GRAMOPHONE Review: Tchaikovsky Swan Lake excs – Philharmonia Orchestra/Rouvall
Like Oliver Twist I’m left wanting more. Clearly this Suite from Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece was part of a larger concert programme serving its purpose well in the wider context – and maybe, just maybe, it was just too irresistible not to rescue for posterity on CD. But at a mere 43 minutes it’s a little like enjoying the canapés and being denied the banquet.
Rouvali is plainly a conspicuously exciting talent (as witness the way he roared in with that blinder of a performance of Sibelius’ First Symphony from a year or so back) and his credentials are stamped across every inflection of these slim pickings – but being so tantalisingly offered one or maybe two numbers from a broader sequence of numbers or arriving at the sensational final scene at the emotional climax without experiencing what goes before but only what comes after robs the music of context and drama.
But I must put aside fantasies of what the complete ballet might have brought us and how it might have sounded and applaud (as do this audience) what is offered. We bow in with the Grand Waltz which has more than a touch of Imperial splendour about it and abounds – especially in the trio variants – in so much felicitous detail. I love the touch of Russianesque vibrato in the trumpet solo and the rosiny sweep of strings down on the G-string in the variant which follows. Needless to say, the piccolo catches the light like fairy dust in the closing bars.
Rouvali has an acute sense of bodily movement in these extracts and more importantly knows how to counterbalance classical poise and romantic abandon. The swagger of the ‘Dance of the Goblets’ – a grand Polonaise – is born of the perfect tempo with a rush of excitement in the coda so welcome in the concert hall where it might not be in the theatre.
As I say we arrive in the final scene at that extraordinarily emotive release in the strings just prior to the return and apotheosis of the swan theme (aficionados will know exactly where I mean) but it needs to have come from somewhere (the storm sequence) in order to floor the listener as we know it can and does. That said, Rouvali does not pull his punches in the major key modulation of the swan theme. That moment is like levitating.
