Orchestra plays Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky

The Russians keep coming (happily, for this patron) at the Kimmel Center, though Vladimir Jurowski would have been the best Russian of all to have. Kurt Masur, the New York Philharmonic's conductor emeritus, has been an occasional guest in Philadelphia since 1982, and is always a sensitive interpreter. His two concerts this past weekend featured symphonies that, separated by only three decades, seem in some respects more like a century apart.

That's not because Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony was a backward-looking work by 1893 standards, or because the Shostakovich First was terribly modern by those of 1925. Rather, the different sound-worlds of these two scores is a measure of the enormous distance traversed by Western art music between them: Impressionism, polytonality and serialism, not to mention the incorporation of factory whistles and typewriters into the ranks of musical instrumentation.

It's probably more accurate to say that there was an overlap rather than an affinity of temperament between Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. Both were enamored of the theater in its various forms, and both shared the Slavic melancholy that's both a cause and a consequence of Russian history; indeed, you couldn't program the Pathétique and, say, the Shostakovich Tenth without risking a massive overdose for your audience.

But Shostakovich had a deeply sardonic side— the antecedent here was Mussorgsky— that was quite foreign to Tchaikovsky, and this quality is uppermost in the first two movements of his First Symphony.

Teenage wonder

Shostakovich composed this work as a graduation piece for the Leningrad Conservatory, and as a work of prodigy it can be compared (aside of course from Mozart) only with Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream and Bizet's Symphony in C. Any number of composers have written impressive and sophisticated works while in their teens, but only these three have produced a straight-off masterpiece that has held the world concert stage (the Bizet Symphony, of course, only after languishing undiscovered for 80 years).

The Shostakovich begins with a snarly, biting figure for bassoon and trumpet, and the music skitters until settling on a satiric, marchlike tune that will return transformed in the finale. The second subject turns on itself contortedly, as if canceling not only its own impulse but also the forward motion of the first theme. Try grading this!

Shostakovich's teachers didn't know what to make of such writing— Stravinsky's Petrushka might have been the nearest analogue— but it was clear from the opening bars that a new voice had entered the world.

Is it a joke?

Somehow, in the mysterious way of genius, the music coheres, although the Shostakovich First is in many respects two separate works. The opening two movements are both mercurial, with a piano obbligato in the scherzo that threads brilliantly through the spare orchestral texture until, near the end, it silences everything else with three thumping chords. This would seem to herald drama of some sort, but it's only another false entrance, and the music subsides inconclusively.

What comes next, however, is a Lento whose plaintively chromatic theme is announced on the oboe. The atmosphere is fevered and Scriabinesque, and the perky humor of the first two movements quite banished.

The listener must wonder whether his leg isn't being pulled (a familiar enough sensation in Shostakovich), but the finale, which continues without pause, brings no relief. Again the orchestra is silenced, this time by a sequence of bare drum-rolls, before rushing forward on a repeated figure that plunges the work to a close with what sounds like a suicide's leap.

Man with two faces

It's extraordinary how much of the mature Shostakovich can be found here (well, it is mature Shostakovich): the sense of a drama that's also a burlesque, and of an implied narrative that never quite surfaces, however urgent the music becomes.

You can find this quality in Russian literature of the period— in Biely's St. Petersburg, for example, or in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita— but no one, finally, achieved such doubleness as Shostakovich. He had to, to survive Stalin and the gray miasma of the Brezhnev years; but it was all here at the beginning. Dmitri Shostakovich was born wearing a mask, and the more overt and straightforward his music sounds, the more you know you are misled.

Tchaikovsky's mood swings

Tchaikovsky, no stranger to emotional extremes, announced both that he was in an "excellent state of mind" while composing his Sixth Symphony, and that he "wept profusely" at the same time. There was no contradiction in these statements— not, at any rate, for a Russian. The music alternates between darkly impassioned lyricism and brisk spirits, and the third movement ends so rousingly that audiences to this day can barely resist applauding as if the work ended there.

The casting vote, however, is the finale, Adagio lamentoso, a prolonged orgasm of despair, unreserved and voluptuous, that seals the work. Maestro Masur plunged into it without pause, clearly meaning to forestall any inopportune reaction to the preceding movement, and he drew some of the evening's best playing in it.

This music is, of course, almost a signature score for the Philadelphia Orchestra. But perhaps its present financial circumstances gave this performance particular relevance.

Masur is now 83, and I didn't always feel the tautness and control that has generally distinguished his work. But he's a grand man of music, and hearing him is always an occasion.