With Tomáš Brauner waving the baton and Gabriela Montero on the piano, the Prague Symphony Orchestra delivers the best of three great composers...
High drama from Eastern Europe infused the Royal Concert Hall as the Prague Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Tomáš Brauner, gave us a whirlwind tour of a grim folk tale, a divisive concerto written in exile, and an all-or-nothing symphony from a composer out of favour with a repressive regime. It was a programme that could have been overwhelming but from which orchestra, conductor and soloist emerged triumphant.
Dvořák’s tone poem The Noonday Witch takes as its starting point a folk tale from which even the Brothers Grimm might have backed away, palms upraised. A mother counters her son’s mischievous behaviour with a warning that the noonday witch will come for him, but unwittingly summons this terrifying creature. She flees the witch but in trying to protect her child, tragically seals his fate. It’s a testament to Dvořák’s skill with melody that he shapes this bleak narrative into such an engaging work. The Prague Symphony Orchestra were alive to its nuances, delivering a rousing start to the concert.
Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 was written over several years during an extended period of self-exile from Russia. It debuted to American audiences with the composer himself as soloist. Public and press reception in Chicago was enthusiastic, while in New York they hated it. Nottingham aligned itself more with Chicago, a response due in no small measure to the brilliance of pianist Gabriela Montero.
the old cliché “the crowd went wild” almost seems like an understatement
During many years of concert-going, I’ve watched pianists preen and pose, gurn and grimace, throw themselves from one end of the keyboard to the other, or hunch introspectively over it as if working on a Glenn Gould impersonation. It was refreshing and immensely gratifying, then, to have in Montero a pianist who simply sat before her instrument, back straight, and got on with the business of the music. Her playing was dynamic and exhilarating. This was Prokofiev delivered with gusto.
More was in store with her encore. Asking the audience for a few notes from a famous melody, perhaps something with a local connection, the immediate suggestion was Ravel’s Bolero (forever associated, and not just in this city, with Torville and Dean). Montero proceeded to improvise an elegant and astoundingly accomplished set of variations on the theme. It was one of those priceless concert hall moments for which the old cliché “the crowd went wild” almost seems like an understatement.
A less intense symphony than Shostakovich’s Fifth might have rendered the second half anticlimactic. Composed at a crisis point in his career, when his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk left him out of favour with Stalin’s apparatchiks and the premiere of his Fourth Symphony was cancelled, the Fifth was his one shot opportunity to re-establish himself. Seldom has a symphony run such an extreme gamut of emotions. In addition to raw terror, desperate hope, a touch of defiance and even a sneakily incorporated measure of subversive wit, the symphony stands as political commentary as well as a statement of creative resurgence.
Like all of Shostakovich’s large-scale orchestral compositions, the Fifth is not for the faint hearted. It makes demands of players and audience, and both embraced the work wholeheartedly, the thunderous bars of the final movement bringing the evening to a cathartic conclusion.
The Prague Symphony Orchestra played at the Royal Concert Hall on Tuesday, February 11th 2025.
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