Seckerson's Choice: Shostakovich Symphonies
Seckerson's Choice presents a regular series of playlists curated exclusively for IDAGIO by the broadcaster and critic Edward Seckerson. In the latest, he presents his personal choice of recordings classic and recent of Shostakovich’s symphonies – a hand-picked selection running from the 19-year-old composer’s First Symphony to the 15th, completed nearly half a century later.
Read more…Vasily Petrenko could quite easily dominate any playlist of the Shostakovich symphonies. His highly regarded cycle for Naxos with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra has garnered praise pretty much across the board. Indeed I remember sitting down with him for at least three hours in one stretch preparing a promotional audio podcast for that very series. His insights were fresh and original and informed in part by his “insider’s” view of how Shostakovich managed to survive the Soviet era and its aftermath whilst honouring his integrity and conscience and protesting vigorously through the coded messages - or “scripts”, as Petrenko called them - in his music, not least, of course, his 15 symphonies.
From a purely musical standpoint the wonder is that so much is conveyed from so little on the page. The directness of this music is extraordinary, its potency drawn from empty wastes wherein solo woodwinds - like old voices - bear witness and lament, where conflict is conveyed in terrifying tattoos of percussion, and seismic eruptions carry the anguish and defiance of a nation. This music is at once deeply personal and vociferously public. It speaks to everyone and its universality seemed to be preordained.
Petrenko aside, and I have singled him out for four of the symphonies - the “experimental” and jingoistic Second and Third symphonies, the sensational (and censured) Fourth which boldly went where no other Shostakovich symphony would go again, and the problematic Twelfth “The Year 1917” (his long awaited Lenin Symphony) which Petrenko transforms from empty filmic tub-thumping to something fierce and angry - a clear case of the subtext redefining the text.
For the rest I have striven to be a little quirky and unpredictable. Neeme Jarvi’s recordings on Chandos are exceptional in many ways and still sound terrific. The precocious First and the sceptical Ninth (which keeps pulling the rug from beneath us by never quite delivering what we expect it to) benefit from Jarvi’s incisiveness and daring. Andrea Nelsons is progressing a tremendous cycle with his Boston Symphony: the Fifth is quite simply as fine as any on disc while his much-lauded Tenth (I led the charge volunteering it as Record of the Month in Gramophone Magazine) completely floors most of the competition. Thrilling in every way.
I wanted Mark Wigglesworth (a fine exponent of this music) in there somewhere and his Sixth - the falsely anticipated “Lenin” Symphony (deliberately leaked as such by the composer?) which turns into a three-ring circus - is splendid. So is Leonard Bernstein’s Seventh “Leningrad” (at one time undervalued on account of its audacious Bolero-like first movement) with the Chicago Symphony and I wanted to remember the late lamented Jakov Kreizberg whose stirring account of the great Eleventh Symphony is really worth hearing.
The Eleventh is perhaps my favourite of the Shostakovich symphonies. Often frowned upon for being too “pictorial” or, as some have put it, “superior movie music”, it chronicles the failed “1907” Revolution in graphic and emotional terms, movingly using, as its thematic fabric, a series of revolutionary songs. The long cor anglais solo in its finale is perhaps the single most poignant expression of regret in all Shostakovich. Not so much regret for the failed revolution but for the misery of what came to pass in Stalinist Russia and beyond.
I also wanted to celebrate the “old guard” of Russian music with four conductors closely associated with the composer. Yevgeny Mravinsky’s Eighth is harrowing and authentic, so too Rudolf Barshai’s Thirteenth “Babi Yar” which is as close as Shostakovich ever came to a statement of disgust at his nation’s shameful past. Rarely has musical word-setting - the powerful poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko - expressed such kinship with its source.
The same might be said of the Fourteenth Symphony (dedicated to Benjamin Britten) and its poetic intimations of Death. It is one of the handful of true masterpieces amongst this symphonic oeuvre.
The last symphony has the last word posing more questions than it answers. Kirill Kondrashin - who premiered both the Fourth and Thirteenth symphonies - stealthily but incisively lets us into its secrets. And there is that last laugh: the ticking percussion motif from the forcibly withdrawn Fourth Symphony which appears once more in the closing pages quietly reaffirming what might have been Shostakovich’s mantra “I will not be silenced”.
- Edward Seckerson