St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra

The first international performance to test the acoustics of the Arts Centre’s all-new (doesn’t seem to have changed that dramatically) Butterworth Hall was many things; subtle wasn’t one of them. Opening with a couple of fragments of Mussorgsky’s lusciously widescreen opera, ‘Khovanschina’, and closing with Tchaikovsky’s totally-fucking-exhausting final symphony (No.6), the sheer scale of the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra’s strings continually swept across one’s face like a wet freight-train. Soloist Guy Johnston played, and conductor Alexander Dmitriev led, from memory, and the resultant theatricality of both men’s freed-up movement was almost distracting. Oh, and there were a couple of encores. One of which was Air on a G String. You get the idea.

Strangely, though, all this grandeur wasn’t framed in a particularly uplifting way, the result being a concert haunted by a rather peculiar maudlin undercurrent, which seemed to confuse the punters somewhat. The Tchaikovsky is, after all, entitled ‘Pathéthique’ for a reason. The spontaneous applause which bubbled up in various ill-educated corners of the hall at the almost wedding-bell-esque crashbangwallop close of the third movement betrayed the audience’s desire for the supercharged finish; what they got instead was one of the great moments of bathos in all of 19th Century music, a funereally affecting descent into quiet and dark (Tchaikovsky died eight days after its world premiere). The aforementioned encores were clearly an attempt to lift the mood – the concert was billed as a part of the Butterworth’s re-opening celebrations, after all – but felt rather crowbarred-in, the lingering Tchaikovskian melancholy outlasting their enthusiastic flickerings.

Johnson’s take on Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No.1 (sandwiched between the Mussorgsky and the Tchaikovsky) didn’t help matters either. The former Young Musician of the Year has matured gracefully – his high notes gleamed, crisp and chill, and he handled Saint-Saëns’ lurchingly demanding deviations with a self-contained ease. There was, however, a physical earnestness to his performance – so acute that it seemed, at times, that one could almost hear the click of connection as plunging bow met string – that felt at odds with his stagemates’ occasionally pococurante approach. Dmitriev, though balletic, couldn’t be said to be a particularly intense conductor, and his orchestra (which he has guided, and shaped for more than 30 years – and it shows) is at its best when drenching a hall in creamily concentric circles of swell. The resulting collaboration was a strange, vaguely predatory game of cat and mouse, enormously exciting, but hardly jubilant.

And all this in the wake of Mussorgsky’s luxurious, tambourine-studded comfort blankets, conventional and, if anything, overmelodic – too easy a start, perhaps, for this kind of orchestra. A slightly off-kilter night of big, big orchestral works then: a night that didn’t take off in the way that, one suspects, the Arts Centre was expecting, hoping, but a night that was probably far more compelling for that very reason.