Philadelphia Inquirer — 26.10.2004

RUSSIANS' ENCORES STUNNING, By Peter Dobrin

An encore, most often, is something light, a piece of daring or relative fluff meant to send an audience whistling on its way. But Yuri Temirkanov has other ideas. Leading the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra in the season opener of the Kimmel Center's visiting-orchestra series, Temirkanov chose as the final encore a fight scene that ends with horrific music as the loser's body is being carried away.

On paper, it might seem a bizarre choice. Yet not only did the sliver of Prokofiev's Romeo and Julietact as a wonderfully emotional postscript to Sunday afternoon's concert, but it also gave the orchestra exactly the piece it seemed born to play.

That'll teach an audience to leave before the program is really over. Perhaps a third of listeners were already out of Verizon Hall for the Romeo and Juliet. Up until that point, the St. Petersburg came across as a decent enough orchestra - slightly flabby in Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1, highly competent as collaborators in Schumann's Piano Concerto, and in Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances, well, let's save that for the moment.

But in the ballet music based on Shakespeare, the orchestra gathered around it a terrifying anger. The strings were virtuosic as they had been nowhere else on the program, and the brass roared, though with absolute focus and no ugly edge. Temirkanov hammered the blows in the music by slowing down with each one, and then, slowly, but with the rolling inevitability of a Sherman tank, let loose with the music for Tybalt's funeral cortege. It was the most terrifying and beautiful account I've heard of this score, and not just because we are used to experiencing it only from a reduced orchestra down in the ballet pit. It was a message from a scary-wonderful world.

The first encore was equally stunning, though at the other end of the dynamic scale. In the introduction from Rimsky-Korsakov's Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, the orchestra whispered its wilderness impressions.

Temirkanov, St. Petersburg's artistic director and, through 2005-06, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, is the most visually unassuming of conductors. In Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances, even in moments of extravagant music, Temirkanov used economical gestures. He knows that the podium is the last refuge on earth for the gods, and when you're a god, you don't have to prove it to anyone.

As for the orchestra, the choice of the piece was a coals-to-Newcastle situation. We pretty much own the Symphonic Danceshere; Rachmaninoff dedicated them to the Philadelphia Orchestra, and we are used to hearing them a certain way. (Actually, the program as a whole was very Ormandy.) The strings from St. Petersburg were fine, but they did not endow the piece with the deep resonance our ears are used to hearing as part of the performance tradition.

Pianist Helene Grimaud was also most revealing in her encore: Rachmaninoff's Etudes-Tableaux (Op. 33, No. 2),which was a shimmering world unto itself. I had a tough time getting a real sense of her personality in the Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor (Op. 54), though I appreciated her view that momentum is just as important as rubato in this music.