The Philharmonia is having a rough time at present, though not, it should be pointed out, one of its own making. Hard on the heels of Wolfgang Sawallisch's withdrawal, due to illness, from the first chunk of the orchestra's Beethoven cycle, another problem reared its head in the form of a starry instrumentalist - in this case virtuoso clarinettist Michael Collins - insisting on a change of repertoire at comparatively short notice.
Collins was scheduled to play Mikhail Pletnev's transcription for clarinet of Beethoven's Violin Concerto, a work doubtless deemed an oddity by some, though reviews varied from the favourable to the ecstatic when it appeared on CD. At the time, Collins claimed that the arrangement, a collaborative effort, "makes one appreciate the unrivalled beauty of the clarinet." Now, it would seem, he's changed his mind. Issuing a statement that "the transcription... doesn't work," he announced he would perform the Mozart Clarinet Concerto instead.
This, however, didn't work particularly well on this occasion either. The romantic sensibility that informs Collins's playing was, it's true, very much in evidence, with the concerto's mix of humour and nostalgia expertly captured. Co-ordination between soloist and orchestra was poor, however, with Collins spending most of his time staring at the leader, for some reason, rather than looking at conductor Yakov Kreizberg (usually an impeccable Mozartian), who consequently struggled to shape the work round him. Some of the speeds were perverse, with the Adagio taken so slowly as to reach a virtual standstill, though Collins was able to float some ethereal phrases over the resulting string miasma.
Things mercifully improved when Kreizberg and the Philharmonia were left to their own devices for Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. The work famously embodies Shostakovich's ambivalent capitulation to the tenets of Soviet aesthetics and Kreizberg offers a deeply pessimistic view of it, unleashing a performance of cold totalitarian rigidity, vast, lethal and unremitting. He only allows the oppressive mood too abate in the slow movement, in which we're granted a brief glimpse of exhausted humanity toiling away under impossible conditions.
