Russians and the Russian musical tradition
Mon, Sep 5 2011, 5:50PM
I've just been listening to the new 'version for concert performance' of Eugene Onegin on MDG (State Symphony Orchestra of Russia/Mark Gorenstein) on MDG, and discover that in practice this means an Onegin with some pretty heavy cuts, either by complete excision of numbers or some pretty drastic cuts to the numbers which remain. As a performance it strikes me as committed and enjoyable, and the Moscow audience in June 2009 clearly enjoyed it a good deal.
Not for the first time the paradox of the Russian attitude towards its own musical tradition strikes home: capable of making Western orchestras sound tame, unidiomatic and uncommitted by comparison, Russian musicians are yet happy to 'help' composers like Tchaikovsky by making cuts which seem to me pretty arbitrary. (I'm sure we all have our examples: I think of the Manfred symphonies I've heard with that 'alternative' 10-minute finale, the Nutcracker suite released by Temirkanov and the St Petersburg PO a couple of years ago on EMI with numbers chopped off in their prime, and the recent 'performing version' of Swan Lake from the Mariinsky and Gergiev on Decca, which has also just been heard at the Proms.)
Given the commitment of playing by so many Russian orchestras, there's clearly no question of a lack of affection or dedication. I wonder, though, whether anyone has any ideas about why the Russian attitude towards its own musical tradition seems so different from that in the West, where fidelity to the score is generally all?
I think they would do the same to Beethoven and Mozart if they thought they could get away with it. They have a certain authority in their own music which is harder to question. We all did it once but tastes have changed here. Globalisation is steamrolling all in it's path, but steamrollers move slowly.