United Kingdom Mosolov, Rachmaninov, Korsun, Prokofiev: Anna Vinnitskaya (piano), London Philharmonic Orchestra / Vladimir Jurowski (conductor). Royal Pageant Corridor, London, 21.1.2026. (CK)
Alexander Mosolov – The Iron Foundry
Rachmaninov – Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Anna Korsun – Terricone
Prokofiev – Symphony No.2
This live performance proved that the synergy between Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic is as robust as ever, 5 years on from his 14 years as their Principal Conductor. Their efficiency of Lyatoshynsky’s Symphony No.3 was one among my standout live performance experiences of 2025, and this will effectively show to be a kind of for 2026. Expectations are excessive for the completion of their long-range Mahler cycle with the forthcoming Tenth Symphony, in Rudolf Barshai’s performing version.
But the invoice of fare might effectively have seemed, to some, distinctly unpromising: Rachmaninov’s dazzling Paganini Rhapsody hemmed in by two blistering monuments of 1920’s Russian Constructivism and a up to date piece which takes no prisoners.
A century on, one other hundred years of our planet’s capability to help life squandered, it’s arduous for us to really feel the optimism, the celebratory pleasure within the brutal dissonances of Alexander Mosolov’s infamous The Iron Foundry: but whereas the music lasts, in a efficiency like this, we’ve a style of it. Pistons clanked, piledrivers pounded, trumpets screeched, trombones blared, flutes and piccolo whirred; the 5 horns, standing with raised bells, yelled euphorically over the tumult. Splendidly loud, and throughout in lower than 4 minutes.
Just a few weeks after their spectacular efficiency of Rachmaninov’s problematic Symphony No.3 below Edward Gardner, it was good to listen to the LPO deal with one other late work – the Paganini Rhapsody – about which no critic has ever carped: they had been very a lot on level, the strings lithe and sprightly. At first, I questioned whether or not Anna Vinnitskaya’s neat enjoying may presage a relatively bland efficiency: however in fact the magician Rachmaninov ensures that blandness just isn’t an possibility for the pianist, and her enjoying gave constant pleasure with out ever changing into overly rhetorical.
The Dies Irae at Variation 7 gave the music depth with out over-emphasis. The following Variations introduced brilliance, a splash of diabolism, Romantic heat: Vinnitskaya’s delicate passagework seeming, at one level, to remodel the piano right into a harp. The chic Variation 18 – Rachmaninov’s major-key inversion of Paganini’s theme – swam in with the tide and floated out once more with no clouding of the music’s circulate. It was a beautiful efficiency, superbly proportioned; and regardless of Rachmaninov’s very good artifice it sounded utterly pure.
I’ve heard Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun’s Terricone earlier than, carried out by Kirill Karabits and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, who commissioned it: so I used to be ready for its shock techniques and its uncommon percussion. That is no mere try and épater les bourgeois although: it is filled with cries – human and imitated by devices – and it has a horrible pallor which evokes all too clearly the reminiscences of a composer who grew up within the Donbas amid synthetic mountains of mining waste. What her nation has suffered, and continues to undergo, from Putin’s Particular Army Operation offers it modern pressure. Korsun says ‘listeners and performers can interpret it in numerous methods’. What I noticed in my thoughts’s eye was mud blown alongside the wrecked streets of Mariupol. And Gaza.
Jurowski, elegant and authoritative as all the time, ensured that we had been spared no element (the massive rating, a yard throughout, overflowed its stand). His potential to maintain disciplined, laser-like depth over lengthy spans served him – and us – effectively within the extraordinary first motion of Prokofiev’s Second Symphony: a brutal, dissonant fanfare, and we had been again the place we began in Mosolov’s foundry. A piece ‘fabricated from iron and metal’ was Prokofiev’s intention; Robert Layton described it as ‘an interminably sustained fortissimo relieved solely by an occasional forte’. Prokofiev doesn’t inflate his orchestral forces – the orchestra is similar to that of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, in reality with much less percussion – however goodness, he makes the musicians work! Along with his mental acuity Jurowski was clearly exhilarated by the music (his toes left the rostrum at the very least twice).
The opening of the second motion – a relatively stunning threnody for clarinet over rocking strings – introduced some respite, not least for the brass and percussion gamers. Strings and woodwind held the stage; there was some tough work for the contrabassoon, some cool lyricism …after which, with scurrying woodwind and martial strings, we had been pitched again into the foundry. Agile trumpets, a seismic march for double basses and contrabassoon that got here to us via the ground, an onslaught of horns and bass drum; a large processional (Varèse’s Amériques, written a couple of years earlier, didn’t appear distant) earlier than the music slowly dissolved through a plaintive oboe and a lugubrious bassoon.
I’m very glad I heard this efficiency, and I can not think about this music being higher finished. Not even by Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra, just a little over 20 years in the past. And what a pleasure it was to see the double basses delivered to their toes, rightly and enthusiastically cheered.
Chris Kettle
