Conductor with sixth sense for Russian depth

Alexander Lazerev conducts at the Auckland Town Hall.

No doubt about it, Russian conductor Alexander Lazarev is one of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's hot tickets this season.

Last week, Concert FM reminded us of his blistering 1996 performance of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony and he returns this weekend to give us the composer's Sixth as well as Rachmaninov's First and a commission from Gillian Whitehead.

In conversation he is blunt and a little defensive. Observations on the weather are not in our favour: "In Russia we have all four seasons, you don't."

And he bristles when people load the music of Shostakovich with subtexts of suffering and oppression.

"He was the number one composer in his society and lived comfortably," Lazarev says. "He could have gone to the United States, but he didn't. Only Shostakovich knows what lies behind his works, and perhaps his son."

As for Saturday night's Sixth Symphony, Lazarev remembers how, as a student, he was "very impressed and depressed after hearing this work. It may seem positive and brilliant at the end but it's not. It's very deep and pessimistic music."

Rather than bring Lenin into the conversation - in 1938 the composer was promising a work based on the Mayakovsky poem to the dead leader - I feel safer asking about its grim, circus-like Finale.

"It's more like a Bosch painting, with thousands of small ugly figures and faces. You can paint wonderful pictures in this movement.

"It may seem funny on the surface and brilliant at the end, but there is also complete destruction."

If the Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies are Lazarev's present Shostakovich favourites, then the Sixth had that honour in his student days at the Moscow Conservatoire.

"I won the first prize in a competition when I conducted the Sixth," he says. "I was crazy about it."

Lazarev is eager to talk about Friday night's Rachmaninov. "At the conservatoire we studied him alongside Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov as a 19th-century composer.

"The First Symphony may not be played very often, but it's very important for the composer because it contains so many ideas that you hear in his later music. It's all in the campanella, or bells.

"Rachmaninov became popular early on with his C sharp minor Prelude, in which you can hear bells, and much later composed The Bells for choir and orchestra.

"Bells are such an important part of Russian life. If something happens they ring bells and everyone comes - weddings, funerals and war. So it was also a very important colour for the Russian composer."

Lazarev says Rachmaninov was "the last melodic composer in Russia after Tchaikovsky" and points to the composer's popular Second Piano Concerto.

"Only he could compose the endless melodies that he did. There is one right at the beginning of the Second Concerto and you cannot find the end of it."

Although it is this Russian repertoire that has cemented Lazarev's reputation in Europe, undertaking complete Shostakovich and Prokofiev cycles with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, he is swept away to be taking part in the premiere of Gillian Whitehead's commission Karohirohi.

"Many conductors talk cynically about contemporary music but I like and respect it," he says. "She has found some interesting and unusual sound colours from the water and the ocean. It's been a pleasure to rehearse it and the soloist, Carolyn Mills, is a very good harp player.

"It may be difficult to conduct, but I like those sorts of difficulties."

* Alexander Lazarev with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra at the Auckland Town Hall, Friday 6.30pm and Saturday 8pm.