Orchestra plays Shostakovich and Mozart

The angel and the titan

ROBERT ZALLER

Everyone knows that the music of angels is almost too good for human ears, while that of titans— those heavenly precursors of the Olympian gods— is almost too harsh. Verizon Hall had some of each in the recent Philadelphia Orchestra concert under guest conductor Ingo Metzmacher, which featured the eclectic combination of Weber’s sturm und drang overture to Der Freischutz with Mozart’s sublime Fifth Violin Concerto, K. 219, and Shostakovich’s battering-ram of a Fourth Symphony.

With all the storm raging about the Orchestra itself, it’s still playing very well, if not always urgently. Its silken accompaniment to soloist Gil Shaham’s sublime reading of Mozart’s last formal violin concerto— a very premature farewell, at the age of 19— made for sheer delight.

Shaham, elfin in the kind of monkish black outfit favored by Christoph Eschenbach on the podium— a musical equivalent of Seventies ’70s leisure suits— tossed off his part as if he were indeed a visitant from a higher region, with a playful half smile and sudden dance steps to the left, one long and two short, that made it seem as though he would wind up in someone’s lap. That was the only accident that seemed possible, though, as he drew one ravishing phrase after another from under his bow, really just one long, unbroken, golden flow. This listener can say he has heard perfection once in this life at least, and the rest of the audience obviously agreed, giving Shaham a standing ovation rare indeed for something other than a Romantic warhorse.

‘A game that may end badly’

The Shostakovich Fourth is, of course, another matter entirely. Composed in 1935-1936, it waited for public performance until the next to last day of 1961, and therein lies a tale. Shostakovich withdrew the score from rehearsal after a Pravda review attacked a revival of his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, warning him that he was “playing a game that may end badly.” In the atmosphere of Stalin’s Great Terror, just getting underway, there was little doubt what that “end” would be.

Shostakovich “replaced” the Fourth Symphony a year later with his hugely popular Fifth, but he kept the numbering both of the symphony and what would have been its opus number (43) as a silent protest. And ten years later he produced a short score that circulated privately in Russian musical circles.

Nonetheless, even after Stalin’s death in 1953, it took a further eight years for the Fourth to see the full light of day. There is no story comparable to this in musical history. Other major works have had to wait years, decades and even generations for performance— some of the Schubert symphonies, for example, or the Bizet Symphony in C— but none for political reasons (Bizet’s score was simply lost for 80 years).

The New York audience walked out

It is true that Shostakovich concealed other works, such as his First Violin Concerto, when the political winds blew crosswise. But the Fourth Symphony was uniquely, publicly censored while it was already in preparation and the talk of the town. And while Soviet authorities were so anxious to get Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony before Western audiences as a propaganda vehicle that the microfilmed score was flown out of Nazi-besieged Russia via Teheran, the Fourth remained an unperson— a black hole in the oeuvre of one of the world’s most prominent composers.

What would have been the fate of the Fourth had it been performed in 1936, and of Shostakovich himself? I got a strong suggestion at a concert that featured it in Avery Fisher Hall some years ago, conducted by André Previn. After the first movement--a colossus, 30 minutes long-— half the audience walked out. I’ll never forget the stunned look on Previn’s face as he turned to watch the stampede. This was New York?

Ormandy/Mahler links to Shostakovich

No such episode occurred last week in Philadelphia. But then, the Fourth is now relatively familiar from recordings, and Shostakovich is no longer controversial but an approved (if still unsettling) classic. This score also enjoys a special Philadelphia connection, since Eugene Ormandy, who championed Shostakovich in the ’60s less flamboyantly— but, let it be said, no less importantly than Leonard Bernstein did Mahler— gave it its American premiere, as well as a recording that remained, for nearly a generation, the only one commercially available.

Mahler is, in fact, the presiding deity of the Shostakovich Fourth, though it is a Mahler brought up to date with grinding dissonances and astringent harmonies, as well as a highly discursive musical structure in which ideas and episodes tumble over one another in manic profusion. The symphony’s final unity— and it has one— lies in the mysterious alchemy of its collage-like parts; and its most jarring (and electrifying) moment— the grand peroration that introduces the extended coda of its final movement— is the capstone that seals the work, a great tragic cry that wells up out of a depth unrevealed until then.

Like a racehorse at full gallop

Metzmacher was generally in control of the work, though his studied tempi at times marred the headlong momentum of the first movement— a whirligig that no more takes the halter than a racehorse at full gallop— while he disappointingly rushed the peroration, the one moment in the score that calls for genuine expansiveness. One could have wished, too, for a rougher edge to the strings, especially the cellos, such as a Rostropovich might have drawn from them. No politeness, please. But the winds, brass, and tympani were all in good form; and special thanks to the celesta for its bright, vibrant final note, as the strings hushed down in a remarkable diminuendo to the final silence.

As is well known, Shostakovich returned to sonata form in his Fifth Symphony, and many commentators, viewing the Fourth as a road not taken, have suggested that his development as a modernist was aborted by the need to produce music that met more conventional and politically safer expectations. We can’t know for sure, of course, and it must be borne in mind that, after the Fourth, every one of Shostakovich’s subsequent 11 symphonies was a political event in which a great deal was at stake not only for him personally but for others as well— a burden unlike that imposed on any other artist in history.

It should be noted, however, that Shostakovich had already reverted to sonata form in such works as his First Piano Concerto and his Cello Sonata, and that the musical world was in general tending toward more traditional forms by the late 1930s. Prokofiev, asked why he had eschewed his own earlier style, replied that he now found in sonata form everything necessary for his musical expression. This, too, was no doubt expedient, but it wasn’t necessarily untrue. The Shostakovich Fourth may have been, instead of a road not taken, one that had already been traversed.