Paul Corfield Godfrey, Seen and Heard International, 25th September 2014
“The programme for Janáček’s symphonic fantasy Taras Bulba is of a violent barbarism which makes Game of Thrones look like Paddington Bear, with each of its three movements describing the grisly death of a member of the same Cossack family. Nevertheless Janáček’s music manages to provide plenty of lyric contrast, interlacing pastoral episodes with the more full-blooded dramatic tableaux. The orchestra under Michael Francis made the most of all these juxtapositions, with a biting savagery in the string playing that is exactly what the music demands, and avoiding any sense of tameness such as one sometimes finds in performances that stress the symphonic nature of the writing at the expense of the pictorial. The tortured clarinet playing of Robert Plane at the end of The death of Ostap froze the blood…
As I observed earlier this year when reviewing the performance of the Frescoes of Piero della Francesca at St David’s Hall, Cardiff audiences have had a soft spot for Martinů ever since Mackerras’s performances of The Greek Passion at Welsh National Opera in 1981, and this symphony only whetted the appetite for more of [Martinů’s] original yet totally characteristic music. The orchestra played like gods, and Nick Whiting’s solo violin counter-melody in the final movement was perfectly balanced against the tumultuously surging background. The climaxes were properly overwhelming.”
