Beethoven and Shostakovich at the Kimmel

What propelled him forward, though, was an indefinable burst of spirit that can only be described as courage, inadequate as that word may be. The years that immediately followed saw Beethoven not only pursue his art but take it to extraordinary new levels in the Eroica Symphony, the Appassionata Sonata and the Rasoumovsky Quartets. These works transformed their genres. So did the concertos he produced at the same time: the Triple Concerto for Piano, Violin, and Cello; the Fourth Piano Concerto; and the Violin Concerto.

Beethoven knew there had been a breakthrough; he spoke of writing in a “completely new manner.” No one else has trumped it yet.

Imagine the impact

We can debate as to which sonata, symphony, piano concerto, or string quartet represents the summit of Beethoven’s achievement in their respective genres. But there’s no debate about the Violin Concerto in D because it’s the only work in the form he produced. It’s also the king of all fiddle concertos, even though it took several decades to enter the repertory. A contemporary reviewer both praised and complained about its “multitude of interconnected and overabundant ideas and [the] continuous tumult of its combined instruments.”

Audiences don’t hear the work that way anymore. But then, they’ve had two centuries to assimilate it or, at any rate, to make its challenges more familiar. It’s worth pausing, though, to imagine the impact that the works of Beethoven’s new maturity had on his public, and to try to hear with their ears how his abrupt changes of tempo and dynamics, his novel sonorities and unexampled dissonances, must have affected them. A “tumult” indeed.

The Russian violinist Nikolaj Znaider was the soloist for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s performance of the concerto, presented under the baton of guest conductor Stéphane Denève. Znaider’s tone is a bit thin, but it is lyrical, and his technique is impeccable: I was reminded a bit of the late Leonid Kogan. Denève’s accompaniment was robust, but soloist and conductor were more in sync as the performance proceeded. This was not a heaven-storming Beethoven, but one that searched for inflection and nuance.

Humiliated by Stalin

The program’s second half was taken up by Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. Joseph Stalin had presided over a musical reign of terror in the last five years of his life that included a denunciation of leading Soviet composers, Shostakovich foremost among them. As in his earlier period of disfavor in 1936-37, Shostakovich was forced to make humiliating obeisances, and his livelihood (if not, this time, his life) was threatened.

When Stalin decided to rehabilitate Shostakovich, he turned him into a Cold War pawn in a way that severely damaged the composer’s reputation in the West. Shostakovich put his newly composed First Violin Concerto in the drawer as he earlier had his Fourth Symphony and concentrated his serious composing on chamber music, which could be played semi-privately. As the suppression of the Fourth Symphony had marked the end of Shostakovich’s experiments in musical modernism, so too the shift to chamber music had its effect on his later career, turning him increasingly to the medium of the string quartet.

The Tenth Symphony marked an orchestral coming-out after the Stalin era. Having been begun in the summer of 1953, only months after Stalin’s death, it proceeded rapidly and was premiered at the end of the year. For musical Moscow, this was a political as much as a cultural event. Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony had been read as a coded response to the Great Purges of the 1930s, and his wartime Seventh and Eighth symphonies as a lament not only for Russia’s suffering under Hitler’s assault but also at the hands of its native dictator. What would Shostakovich have to say this time, and how freely could he speak in the still uncertain, post-Stalinist atmosphere?

Colossal architecture

The Tenth begins with a repeated phrase in the low strings that seems to struggle up from the depths, and it contains an inversion of the four-note motif — D, E-flat, C, and B — that will dominate the symphony and is a musical transliteration of the composer’s monogram in German, DSCH. A plaintive theme emerges in the strings and winds that builds to a climax and then yields to a wayward, twittery waltz tune that, like so much of Shostakovich, contains the seed of a central climax that breaks off into an extended orchestral recitative and a lengthy recapitulation. It’s a colossal piece of musical architecture: the most impressive movement of what many regard as Shostakovich’s finest symphony.

The whirlwind scherzo that follows has been described, trivially, as a musical portrait of Stalin, but it’s perhaps best seen as a condensation of the first movement’s extended narrative as well as a release of its long-held tension. The symphony takes a different turn with the third-movement Allegretto, which boldly declares the DSCH motto and interweaves it with a motif (E-A-E-D-A) that encrypts the name of a young student, Elmira Nazirova, with whom Shostakovich was deeply infatuated. The finale begins with an Andante that plunges into some of the bleakest depths in all Shostakovich, only to segue into a madcap Allegro tune that seems to belie the severity of all that has gone before until revealing its own darker side. The conclusion hammers home the DSCH motif in a defiant gesture of survival.

Hope for Verizon Hall

The personal and the political are inseparable in the Tenth, and a conference held to discuss its ideological significance after its premiere could come up with nothing more to describe it than the fatuous phrase “optimistic tragedy.” We needn’t worry such matters now, nor, happily, need Russians.

Denève stopped his performance after the first few notes to chide a cell phone user, took a breath, and plunged into a compelling reading that saw the Orchestra in top form, particularly in a series of superb wind solos. Detail work stood out as it rarely does in Verizon Hall, which shows you what acoustical wonders are possible with the right attention to phrasing and balance. The Philadelphia Orchestra originally evolved its distinctive sound in response to the limitations of its long-time home, the Academy of Music. Perhaps the beast of Verizon Hall can be similarly tamed one day. Then again, it would be nice if the Orchestra had a space worthy of its efforts. Maybe next century.