On Saturday evening in the Royal Albert Hall, the Aurora Orchestra performed Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, as part of the BBC London Proms.
From memory.
A prodigious feat.
They’ve been doing it for some years now, and, if memory (sic) serves me right last year they even played The Rite of Spring by heart. To date I’ve been a little sceptical about the whole enterprise. I mean, like, what’s the point? I thought of it as a parlour trick, a gimmick. On Saturday the performance was preceded by “a musical and dramatic exploration” of the symphony. I confess I gave it about a minute. I would have much preferred a pre-concert talk to a dramatization, perhaps in the preferred format of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, of a dialogue between conductor and a member of the orchestra. But the musical and dramatic exploration was too reminiscent for me of another Radio 3 programme, Words & Music, which each week explores a theme through the juxtaposition of music and the spoken word. Next to the unadulterated music, the thespian luvvies always sound so hammy. Anyway I switched off. If I sound a little jaundiced put it down to Shostakovich 13, Babi Yar, which was performed the previous evening at the same venue. Shostakovich 13 is a setting for bass solo, and orchestra, of words by the poet Yevtushenko. Its first movement depicts the horror of the Nazi massacre of Jews during the Second World War in, of all places, Kyiv. Even this late in Shostakovich’s career, the Soviet authorities tried to suppress the 13th Symphony. They wanted to depict Babi Yar as an atrocity inflicted upon the entire Russian people, rather than the Jews. Several bass soloists were leaned on, and pressured not to take part, and who could play them? At last one held his ground, as did the conductor. You can read all about it in Time’s Echo, by Jeremy Eichler. All of that might have been worth a pre-concert talk. But maybe I’m Shostakovich-ed out. Like Mahler, he has become the darling of the concert-going audience. But I promised to switch on again after the interval and hear the fifth symphony.
I would say I know it well. I first heard it in concert when, following the tragic fire in the St Andrew’s Hall, the beleaguered RSNO were playing in a run-down Glasgow cinema, the Gaiety, in the middle of a sea of mud that was the building site of the M8 which, for better or worse, cut a swathe through the heart of Glasgow. So that must have been late 60s, early 70s, when Shostakovich was very much in the land of the living. I remember, of course, the arresting opening, and the first movement’s serene melody’s first exposition in the first violins’ high register. At the time, in the west, Shostakovich was far from the mainstream figure he was shortly to become. But shortly afterwards I got the chance to play the symphony. I recall we performed it in Glasgow University’s Bute Hall. There is no better way of learning a piece of music, one might even say, by heart.
In the event, I was greatly taken by the Aurora Orchestra’s performance on Saturday evening. Maybe there’s something to this business of playing from memory after all. Even with vast forces present, it sounded like chamber music. An intense collaboration.
It’s not without its risks. I suppose jeopardy must partly be the attraction for the audience. A high-wire act. I once attended a piano recital in the Perth Concert Hall given by Mitsuko Uchida. She played the last three Beethoven Sonatas, Op. 109, 110, and 111, not only from memory – de rigueur in the case of a concert pianist – but also as a single entity, without interruption. That has become another gimmick in the concert world, the amalgamation of disparate pieces. I’ve heard Sibelius 7 follow Sibelius 6 without a break, and I’ve with increasing frequency being hearing works by different composers being run together, for example Berg’s 3 pieces running straight into Webern’s 6 – a car crash if ever there was one. So when Madame Uchida presented Ops 109 – 111 as a single piece, I held my breath. The last time I’d heard her play, in the same concert hall, she had again performed Beethoven, the Sonata in A Op. 101, and then the next sonata in the catalogue, the towering Sonata in B flat, für das Hammerclavier, Op. 106. During the last movement of the Op. 101, there was a power cut. Mitsuko Uchida carried on playing in the pitch dark. But when it came to the fugue, she had to stop. She said in a characteristically Japanese whisper, “I cannot play the fugue in the dark.”
So she might have suspected that gremlins were lurking in Perth. Sure enough, during the last movement of the Op. 110 – another fugue – she had a memory lapse. It was as if she had taken a wrong track in a dense forest, and she was trying to improvise a way back. Even, perhaps especially, for a listener, it was a remarkably discomfiting and unnerving experience. She had to stop. So I’m always happy to see music stands on the concert stage, even if they are only there for an emergency.
The hoopla surrounding Shostakovich 5, no doubt a cause for dramatization, concerns the extremely negative reaction by Stalin to the “formalist” fourth. Shostakovich had to produce “a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism” otherwise he could expect the nocturnal knock on the door from the KGB. He kept a suitcase packed ready for the occasion. So the prevailing wisdom is that Shostakovich was indeed performing a high wire act, by producing a work which would satisfy the authorities, while simultaneously driving its real meaning underground. Is the apparent triumph of the symphony’s close ironic? Nowadays its rendition is much slower, and more strident, certainly than it was when I first heard it in the Gaiety Theatre. I suspect the idea that the mood of celebration is fake, is probably true. Shostakovich’s music is often sardonic. Perhaps it shares something with the pre-war Berlin cabaret music of Kurt Weill, a sense that all is not well, that all is not as it would appear. We hear it again in the music of Alfred Schnittke. A solo violin gives a beautiful rendition of Stille Nacht, ending on a grotesque dissonance. If Shostakovich’s music sounds as if it was composed in a lunatic asylum, it’s probably because in essence it was.
I wonder what Shostakovich would have made of the Alaska Summit, last week, and of the Oval Office meeting that is about to take place, as I write, today. At least President Zelenskyy has support from several European leaders this time, but I’m not sure how the meetings will be structured, or whether Zelenskyy will need to brave the lions’ den alone, before the others join him. Moreover, I see J. D. Vance has just finished his holiday in Ayrshire and left Scotland, flying out of Prestwick on Air Force 2. So it’s conceivable we could have a re-run of that frightful interview earlier in the year. When Stalin died in 1953 – on the same day as Prokofiev – Shostakovich must have breathed a sigh of relief. You can hear it in the last movement of the tenth symphony. Now he might say, “Here we go again.” I wonder if Mr Putin admires Shostakovich.
My favourite Shostakovich Symphony is his last, the 15th. It is full of quotations, ironies, quirks, and, like the viola sonata, a sense of finality, even of impending death. The metronomic use of percussion at its close is mesmerising. The clocks are ticking.
jamescalumcampbell 