Orchestra plays Shostakovich (1st review)

In our jet-setting age, permanent music directors are like chefs who light the fire and let others tend the broth. Thus, after a gala opening concert featuring Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony followed by a first regular concert with Mahler’s Fourth, Yannick Nézet-Séguin yielded the podium this past week to visiting conductor Semyon Bychkov. Maestro Bychkov also programmed a long but much less well-known symphony, the Shostakovich Eleventh, along with the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto.

Beethoven and Shostakovich are not an especially rare pairing these days. Shostakovich may reasonably be seen as the culminating figure of the Western symphonic tradition that began with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, at least to date. Beethoven was clearly a major inspiration both for Shostakovich’s symphonic and string quartet cycles, and the finale of his last completed work— the elegiac Viola Sonata, Op. 147— is a transformation of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

That said, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto pairs oddly with the Shostakovich Eleventh Symphony.

The Fourth Concerto, more classical in feeling than Beethoven’s proto-Romantic Third in C minor, radiates the clarity and candor of mid-period Beethoven. It sparkles with innovation, like virtually everything Beethoven wrote in these years, but it looks back toward the late Mozart piano concertos as well as forward toward Chopin, Schumann and Liszt.

Fiendishly difficult

Yefim Bronfman, the soloist, lacked projection and variety to this listener in the opening Allegro moderato, but in the extraordinary Andante con moto— a dialogue between gruff, stabbing chords in the orchestra and the lyric, introspective response of the piano— he dropped pearl after pearl of limpid sound, and he showed appropriate dash in the concluding Vivace.

As if only getting warmed up, Bronfman then tore into his encore, the whirligig finale of Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata, Op. 83. I’ve never heard this fiendishly difficult music used as a lollipop before, nor have I ever heard it better played.

The Prokofiev might have been regarded as a segue to Shostakovich, and also a counterpoint. Both composers lived through World War II in the Soviet Union, but Prokofiev had spent the earlier part of his career abroad before returning home in the 1930s.

Bittersweet survival

Shostakovich, on the other hand, spent his entire life in Russia, including the years between 1914 and 1945, when some 60 million of his fellow countrymen perished through war, famine and domestic terror. Shostakovich fully expected to be among them during the onset of the Great Terror of 1936-37 after he was publicly attacked in Pravda. At one point, anticipating a midnight arrest, he slept with a fully packed suitcase at his door.

The end of World War II brought only brief respite, and Shostakovich couldn’t freely and publicly compose until after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. His response, in his Tenth Symphony of that year, was a bittersweet celebration of personal survival. In the Eleventh, composed between 1955 and 1957, Shostakovich set himself a different task.

The notional occasion of the Eleventh was the 50th anniversary of the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, which followed on the massacre of peaceful demonstrators outside the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. While the work was in progress, the bloody suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution provided a ghastly reminder of the Winter Palace massacre on a far larger scale, and of the continuity of oppression between the Tsarist and Soviet regimes.

Artistic gamble

If the text of the Eleventh remained the earlier revolution— its four movements are all keyed to its events— the subtext was clearly the horror still fresh in everyone’s mind. It was certainly not lost on Shostakovich’s son Dmitri, an aspiring pianist who attended the rehearsals and nervously asked his father, “Papa, what if they hang you for this?”

But the Eleventh isn’t simply about two episodes separated by a half-century. It’s about that half-century itself, and the myriad of victims in between.

Shostakovich, who had been heavily involved with folk materials in the previous decade, made the decision to compose the Eleventh entirely out of well-known revolutionary ballads that would have been familiar to any Russian concert audience. This was a huge artistic gamble, since the easily identifiable tunes all carried their own emotional and historical freight, and could well have overwhelmed Shostakovich’s personal vision for native listeners.

Problems beyond Russia

His decision, I believe, was based on a desire to ground that vision in a public testimony such as only the ballads themselves, as a distillation of popular suffering and aspiration, could supply. The challenge was to integrate the two.

Shostakovich achieved this by a compositional process that turned the original melodies into a music that, for the listener unfamiliar with their provenance, sounds entirely the composer’s own. As the British critic Hugh Ottaway notes in his analysis of the Eleventh, “Even in his choice of folk-song material, Shostakovich succeeded in reconciling musical function not only with mood but with the world belonging to the tunes.”

The idea of a “public” music in this sense is one deeply rooted in Russian culture, but largely foreign to the West. For this reason, the Eleventh Symphony had a much more problematic reception in the West, where it was unfavorably compared to the Tenth.

The Philadelphia Orchestra didn’t perform it until July 1990, when Stanislaw Skrowaczewski introduced it at a Mann Center concert. Since then, including the present concerts, the Eleventh has been played five times by the Orchestra— not quite repertory status, but approaching it.

Bychkov’s emphasis

With the passage of time, the Eleventh itself has undergone a transformation, just as other program symphonies have— the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique, or Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony. We know there is scene painting in the music, that a specific dramatic action unfolds. But it gradually takes on a more abstract, absolute character as historical or literary recollection fades.

What remains must speak to us in these terms; the rest is musicology. If the Eleventh is performed with the right sensitivity and conviction, it’s no mere evocation of tragic events, but a lament for the human tragedy itself.

Bychkov’s performance emphasized the tapestry-like elements of the score at the expense, perhaps, of some of the drama. But his overall conception was firm.

Last notes

The strings could have used a shade more iciness in the opening Adagio, but in general the Orchestra played splendidly, and the violas’ statement of the main theme of the third-movement Adagio, “O Tsar, Our Little Father,” was breathtaking in its plangency and restraint. This movement, which begins with the plucked chords of a passacaglia that emerges out of a profound silence and rises to an immense climax, is the core of the work, an expression of common suffering and grief that has no parallel except in Mussorgsky.

I waited with interest to see how Bychkov would take the last, equivocal notes of the Finale, which in some performances is broken off without a cadence as if to suggest a “To be continued” rather than a conclusion. Bychkov was right in firming it out, I think, because to end on a fading overtone leaves the listener in a void.

Shostakovich may well have intended that, but simply to break off a surging Allegro in full cry is a dollop of woe too far. One pulls a sheet over the body for a reason.♦