One of the most enduring and productive partnerships in British orchestral life comes to an end next summer, when after 16 years Kirill Karabits steps down as the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor although he will continue his relationship with the orchestra as conductor emeritus, and continuing his Voices from the East series, focusing on music from his native Ukraine and other former Soviet states that’s little known in the west.
So Karabits began the first concert of his final season with a suite from the ballet The Scarlet Flower by Thomas de Hartmann, who was born in Ukraine (in 1884), studied in St Petersburg, and then after the revolution seems to have led a colourfully peripatetic life as a disciple of the mystic George Gurdjieff, before eventually settling in the US. To judge from these samples from the third of the ballet’s six acts, The Scarlet Flower is a spectacularly coloured score, with obvious debts to Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, but totally assured. It’s music that really puts an orchestra through its paces, but the BSO relished all its challenges, utterly secure in every department.
Over the two years the war in his homeland has inevitably preoccupied Karabits, but he has continued to programme the Russian repertory that some conductors have shunned. “I was born in Kyiv but I grew up with Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky,” he said in a recent newspaper interview: “How can I cancel them from my life?” The centrepiece of this concert was Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, with the BSO’s latest artist-in-residence, the 21-year-old Russian Alexander Malofeev, as the soloist. He’s certainly an exciting prospect, with a superb technique, though perhaps not quite yet the finished article; for all the glitter of his performance, the shape of some passages seemed to get lost in the flurries of notes, and it was sometimes left to Karabits and the orchestra to supply the necessary stability.
There was Brahms to follow – the Fourth Symphony in a typically unfussy yet enthralling performance, in which every movement seemed to gain steadily in intensity as it went on. It was a reminder, were one needed, that Karabits’s special qualities can be just as potent in the mainstream as they are in less familiar repertory.
• Broadcast on Radio 3 on 20 October, and then available on BBC Sounds until 19 November
