Vladimir Jurowski’s programme for his latest London Philharmonic concert was a typically uncompromising one. In the broader context of the themes of home, belonging and exile that dominate the orchestra’s current season, he focused on the mid-20th century, specifically on works composed around the second world war. Hindemith’s Violin Concerto, written in 1939 after its composer fled Nazi Germany, was flanked by the dark, post-war uncertainties of Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony (1946) and Galina Ustvolskaya’s Symphonic Poem No 1 (1958).
Ustvolskaya studied with Shostakovich, and her work, like his, was frequently propelled by a search for individualism and integrity amid Soviet proscriptions and orthodoxies. By 1958, she hadn’t quite found the abrasive personal voice that the authorities later deemed suspect, though Symphonic Poem No 1 at once parodies the fixities of official optimism and gazes back to the hieratic chants, bells and rituals of the Russian church. Jurowski’s performance, with its gathering tensions and bitter nostalgia, was a forceful reminder that we don’t hear her music as often as we should.
His interpretation of Prokofiev’s Sixth, meanwhile, was similarly unsparing, the ambivalent mood established at the outset in the contrast between the brass stabs with which it opens and the looping string theme that vainly tries to assuage the immediate sense of unease. A real chill emanated from the mechanistic oscillations of the first movement’s development, and the wrenching dissonances that repeatedly threaten to overwhelm the later movements were crushing in their power. There were moments of considerable beauty, though, in the grieving, consoling woodwind, as well as great brilliance in the finale before its mood irrevocably darkens towards the end.
Hindemith’s Concerto comparably thrives on ambiguity, its perpetuum mobile outer movements oscillating between genuine hope and a breathless, forced breeziness that proves remarkably unsettling. Jurowski’s conducting was clean, clear and exactingly precise, while Gil Shaham played with wonderful silvery tone and an understated dexterity that seemingly belied the often atrocious demands Hindemith places upon his soloist. As an encore Shaham also gave us Isolation Rag, written for him by Scott Wheeler during the 2020 lockdown, a work of quiet elegance, beautifully done.
