Orchestra's season finale

The Philadelphia Orchestra ended its first season under Chief Conductor Charles Dutoit with the odd pairing of Claude Debussy's Images and Dimitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. Odd, because these two composers, and particularly these two works, have as little to say to each other as can be imagined. Even as contrast they don't come off together, because they inhabit such different sonic and emotional worlds.

A little of orchestral Debussy, I must confess, generally goes a long way for me. There are a handful of masterpieces, and a few more works beside that have their moments. The three movements of Images, originally composed for piano, were composed over nearly a decade and strung together as an afterthought. Most often they are played separately, and for good reason. Iberia, the middle movement, is a tone poem in its own right, and longer than the two flanking movements, Gigues and Rondes du printemps (Spring Rounds) combined.

Andre Caplet, who orchestrated Gigues when Debussy fell terminally ill, saw in it the "portrait of a soul in pain . . . that quickly hides its sob behind the mask and the angular gestures of a grotesque marionette." Perhaps the French are more reticent about these things, but I'm afraid I heard nothing of the sort in the agreeable but rather detached pastels of the score.

Iberia is a brisker affair, but its Spanish flavors are a bit stagey; and personally, I prefer to take my De Falla straight. The Rondes, too, are Spanish-accented, and by the time they arrived they were too much of a not-altogether good thing. The Orchestra, while dutiful, sounded a bit heavy.

A composer's dire circumstances

There's no doubt about the emotional weight of the Shostakovich Fifth. Perhaps no major score in musical history—shall we exempt the Mozart Requiem?— was composed under more dire circumstances. Stalin's Great Terror had fallen upon Russia; Shostakovich's long-running opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, was suddenly and ominously attacked in Pravda; and Shostakovich withdrew his aggressively modernist Fourth Symphony just before its scheduled premiere. The composer was no longer shielded by his reputation or his military protector, Marshal Tukachevsky, who himself was purged and executed. So certain was Shostakovich of arrest that he slept with a packed suitcase by the door of his apartment.

The arrest didn't come, and Shostakovich was expected to continue performing his professional duties as a composer. The temptation to produce something anodyne and patriotic must have been overwhelming. But of course no one could predict what, if anything, would satisfy the musical commissars, and Shostakovich also had to reckon with the Moscow public, which waited to see whether he could square the circle by writing something that combined artistic integrity with a popular appeal that even the authorities couldn't gainsay. In short, all that was required was a masterpiece on all counts— which, even if produced, had no guarantee of being credited.

A gesture of solidarity

These were the circumstances of the Fifth Symphony's genesis, and of its tumultuous reception by the Moscow audience at its premiere in November 1937. Listeners wept openly, and reportedly began to stand while the Finale was still in progress. This was obviously a gesture of solidarity, but also a measure of how deeply and immediately the music spoke to the city's embattled intelligentsia. Even Stalin's henchmen couldn't figure out a way to hang the composer— at least not yet.

The Fifth has proved one of the most durable of all 20th-Century symphonies, speaking no less eloquently to audiences far removed from its first Moscow auditors in time and place. The one I was among made its own preference between the two works on the program very clear, giving tepid applause to the Debussy and a standing ovation for the Fifth.

An unpromising start

As for the performance, it started unpromisingly. Phrases in the first movement were slurred, the horns had intonation problems, and Dutoit applied what seemed a stifling glaze to the music.

With the first bars of the Scherzo, however, with cellos and basses digging deeply into their work, things righted themselves; and the remaining two movements, including the problematic Finale that's so often botched, went well enough.

The Fifth is, however, a work whose full effect depends on a completely realized performance, and Dutoit's strangely disengaged reading of the critical first movement— the longest of the four— left it standing on one leg. The same might be said of the Orchestra's situation in general, as this difficult year ends.