Exiles from either Soviet Russia or Nazi antisemitism, three of Europe's leading composers found themselves living in Los Angeles in the late 1930s - though given their rivalries and aesthetic differences, they could scarcely have been classed as friendly neighbours. Works by Rachmaninov, Schoenberg and Stravinsky written in California and premiered between 1940 and 1946 featured in this LSO programme under Valery Gergiev, showing how differently they responded to the challenge of working in this unfamiliar environment.
Curiously, it was the figure often considered the most revolutionary who stuck closest to his pre-American guns. Schoenberg's Violin Concerto, played with masterly command by Nikolaj Znaider, may be written according to his 12-tone method, but betrays a debt to Brahms in its thematic density. As much as its fabled technical difficulty, it is presumably the concerto's lack of display opportunities that dissuades many violinists from tackling it, and here the sense of the solo part arising from the overall texture was highlighted by the orchestra's neat dovetailing with Znaider's sensitive articulation.
Gergiev was on more natural territory in Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, a piece often restrained by an objective approach that stresses its neoclassical credentials, but which was presented here with enriched colours and an almost violent attack that linked it convincingly back to the primitivism of The Rite of Spring.
The momentary nods to modernism that interrupt the phantasmagoria of images from Rachmaninov's (and Russia's) past in his Symphonic Dances suggested that it was actually the most conservative of the three composers whose sense of dislocation from his native tradition impacted most fruitfully on his style; and Gergiev's upfront delivery of its striking ideas and dark fantastical manner was impeccably assured.
