A Review From The Belfast Festival Opening Concert

The Mariinsky Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev
Waterfront Hall, Belfast
October 16th 2009
Dutilleux – Correspondences
Shostakovich – Symphony No.7 in C major, Op.60 (Leningrad)

Mr. Gergiev was described as “the world’s most charismatic conductor” by the Financial Times and, as he conducts, one can see the rapt attention on the faces his players, following his moving hands with the glass-eyed stares of people hypnotised, their shoulders rigid in preparation for an unexpected order. One is reminded most of Mr. Lugosi, who uses, in Mr. Browning’s Dracula, the same double-jointed gesture to draw his victims towards him, while, here, the strings and the winds and the far-off horns swoon elegantly into Mr. Gergiev’s controlling arms. His timing is honed to dramatic effect. A clenched fist punctuates a phrase, not ahead of the orchestra, as if to lead them, but with them, as if the conductor were putting all his weight behind this one unanimous chord. And, where elsewhere, a gentle quiver of the wrist may represent vibrato, his players follow each undulation of that quaking hand precisely. When he reaches, at last, the final bracing call, he brings the orchestra to halt with a grand grasp of his reins – the same motion that Mr. Lugosi uses as the ‘Puppet Master’ in Mr. Wood’s Glen Or Glenda. When he shouts “Pool da strangs!”, we expect the violinists to drop down dead.

This great control keeps the opening of the Leningrad’s Allegretto so tight and martial that one would hardly believe that the flutes secretly represented the freedom of the human spirit at all. Thankfully, come the famous Invasion Theme, the human spirit is crushed by totalitarianism and Mr. Gergiev’s power is truly steeled, tickling out a distant march and breaking out and quelling outrages across the stage. Within ten minutes, the orchestra is unified in a limber lumber towards the audience that seems to stop just short of the city gates. One can’t help but see in the gesticulations of the conductor, or any conductor, the hard rule of the figurehead: the skills of the many drawn in under and directed by the will of the one. And this even from the great Mr. Gergiev, who does so much for good causes; in the man, so are the contradictions of the work. At times, one would rather not look at him.

Many didn’t. The hall was quite empty and, in the final few days, ticket prices were reduced dramatically. His charisma clearly does not extend to the advertising campaign. In all still shots, it must be admitted, he looks like a comic tramp of silent film whose white-shirt front will roll up and snap him in the face this instant. It is a situation quite different to that of Mr. Morricone, who has, at the podium, all the charm of half the podium, but who managed to sell out the same venue two evenings running to open last year’s festival. Let’s not forget, though, that Mr. Morricone is really a movie star; he doesn’t need charisma, as he has gravitas.

An international festival must have an ostentatious opening event and no one would deny that any festival that can coerce Mr. Gergiev to conduct must put him at the top of the bill, but the principal show of the seventeen day run must match a worthy headliner with a worthy reception and it could have been anticipated that the Mariinsky Orchestra would not equal the success of Mr. Morricone and his large ensemble. The latter justified the movement and accommodation of some hundred musicians, all rallied around the great composer. In 2005, Ms. Faithfull performed at the opening show with the Ulster Orchestra. Had the point of this year’s show had merely been Mr. Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the Ulster Orchestra could have hired additional musicians. But the point, of course, was to have Mr. Gergiev here to ratify us as a city of culture, even if classical music is not really part of that culture. It doesn’t necessarily take an arts festival to bring Mr. Gergiev to the province; he visited Omagh ten years ago, in the aftermath of the bomb; but we must presume we have some choice between the two.

There is no ensemble I would rather have play the Leningrad in Belfast than the Mariinsky, nor no one better to conduct them. Mr. Gergiev’s impassioned relationship with the music is clear through every movement; the Russian national character is as etched in his face as it is scrawled on that manuscript; for those players to engage with that music is to engage with their nation’s troubled history and their heritage. To those listening, it had only a fraction of the resonance it had for those playing. For, while there are individuals in Northern Ireland that love this music (plenty of whom turned out), they are only every individuals. We have no heritage of classical music; rather, it feels like an affectation that has been grafted into our own culture. There is no sense of having taken part in the tradition of Western music; we only started joining in once the boundaries were breaking down. A national character was never asserted musically, as, for centuries, we could not agree on what that national character was. Thus, the canon of Western music was not something in which we played much part and, like the opera house in Ulan Bator, it is an imported sort of sophistication. Like the Seventh Symphony itself, it is music used to political ends, to demonstrate where power lies and classify the masses.

The opening ceremony is not the place to show the weight of the festival; it has no weight. The festival should encourage people to engage with art when normally they would not and the way to do this is not through expensive tickets sold on the prowess of the conductor – the importance of which role many casual festival-goers may not care to understand. The welcoming concert should not feel like a challenge and to many I’m sure it did – they didn’t even hear the festival’s true opening number, Mr. Dutilleux’s awkward-sounding Correspondences. Classical music is, sadly, a marginal interest in Northern Ireland and flown-in superstars will not alter that, because people must first care to know who those superstars are.

Those of us who saw Mr. Gergiev pulled the strings were not disappointed and could not have been, but it may have been wiser to use the money, wasted on empty blocks in the Waterfront, to fill seats at the smaller classical events during the festival, through lower ticket prices and greater promotion. Surely, the festival must attempt to make classical music a living part of Northern Irish culture, rather pretending that a great man’s endorsement makes it so.