Orchestra's odd couple: Brahms and Shostakovich

Some people like steak and eggs together. I'm not one of them.

Good concert programming ought to juxtapose works that speak to each other, whether by way of affinity or through a clarifying contrast. It's a knack the Philadelphia Orchestra's programmers seem to have lost; instead, we are invited to "unexpect" ourselves, whatever that most unfortunate marketing solecism was meant to suggest.

Certainly there's nothing wrong with hearing the Brahms Violin Concerto and Shostakovich's 11th Symphony, as in last week's Orchestra performances. They just don't inhabit the same musical universe, and so a listener must block off one to hear the other.

The Brahms concerto is, for all its Beethovenian gestures, a ruminative work that, like the Brahms First Symphony, bespeaks the trouble and perplexity of early middle age. Doubtless much of this was personal, but some of it was artistic, too. Few great composers have ever been as haunted by a predecessor as Brahms was by Beethoven.

The composers who immediately succeeded Beethoven—Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner— all forged their own styles; indeed, one may say that while Beethoven made Romanticism possible, he also made it necessary, since only by clearing new ground was it possible to escape his giant shadow. The great early Romantics achieved this feat, but Brahms, although assimilating them fully as well, deliberately re-entered that shadow. Was there ever so quixotic (and so large) an ambition?

Brahms's private struggle

Brahms liked to belittle his own work— he described the middle movement of his Violin Concerto as a "poor adagio"— but no listener can mistake the titanic struggle he waged with his sense of belatedness. It was essentially a private struggle, waged often from his favorite redoubt in the Carinthian Alps, and it might have produced mere imitation or parody (as such struggles most often do), were it not for Brahms's own genius. This achievement makes him not a comfortable composer, as generations of Philadelphia audiences perceived him, but a perennially intriguing and problematic one.

Of course, Brahms cast his own shadow, and composers as distinct as Schoenberg and Ives had their own work to get beyond it. On Saturday night the young Dutch violinist Janine Jansen attacked the Brahms with passion and formidable technique, although her tone didn't seem quite up to the rest of her equipment, at least in the outer movements. The audience appeared to have no such reservations, giving Ms. Jansen prolonged and standing ovations.

An explicitly public composer

Beethoven was an iconic figure for Shostakovich, too, but of course not in the same way. Art music before Beethoven had been composed for courtly or church audiences, or at most urban sophisticates; he was the first to address the world at large. Shostakovich too is declamatory in his symphonies, and at least six of his 15 are explicitly public works.

The Second and Third symphonies celebrate, respectively, the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution and the annual May Day labor holiday. The Seventh Symphony was dedicated to Nazi-besieged Leningrad, from which Shostakovich himself had been evacuated. Symphonies 11 through 13 deal, in order, with the 1905 Russian Revolution, the October Revolution again, and with the wartime massacre of Jews at Babi Yar in the Ukraine.

Lenin, in the abstract

After his earliest symphonies, Shostakovich was rarely comfortable with overtly public pronouncements, which meant treading a fine line of political and musical orthodoxy. His Sixth Symphony was meant to be a choral work celebrating Lenin, but was instead a purely "abstract" orchestral composition. His Ninth was expected to complete the Mahlerian wartime trilogy of his Seventh and Eighth symphonies, but was instead wry and Haydnesque. The Tenth Symphony had no message, so a three-day Party conference spent its time searching for one. The Thirteenth Symphony proved politically incorrect, and was rapidly suppressed.

It is not too much to say that Shostakovich put his life on the line, at times quite literally, with every symphony he produced after the first three. The mantle of public composer was, for him, a Nessus shirt. The wonder is that he was able to compose at all. Yet silence was not an option. Fate had made him Communism's songbird.

Between Stalin and Hitler

The result was that Shostakovich practiced an art of doubleness. In his allegedly autobiographical Testimony, he is quoted as saying that the Leningrad Symphony was as much about Stalin's destruction of the city's cultural and intellectual elite as about Hitler's invasion. Whether or not the words are his, the sentiment is wholly credible (Shostakovich himself slept for a time with a packed suitcase, anticipating a midnight summons to exile or imprisonment).

Similarly, the Eleventh Symphony was taken not merely as a depiction of the 1905 Revolution but of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, which occurred as Shostakovich was writing it.

The Eleventh is unique in Shostakovich's oeuvre in that its themes are taken wholly from Russian resistance songs: Listen!; Dark Is the Night; Take Off Your Hat; You Fell as Victims; Greetings to Thee, Unfettered Freedom; Rage, Tyrants! These, however, are so thoroughly assimilated into his characteristic orchestral style and harmonic coloring— so Shostakovichized— as to sound quite his own.

Scroll of agony

The first two of the work's four continuous movements depict the Cossack massacre that triggered the revolution; the third is a lament for the fallen, and the fourth— "Tocsin"— a call to arms. One needs to get beyond these programmatic elements, however, to really hear the score as the scroll of agony unfolds from its first, icy bars to the sweeping coda that, eschewing a firm (let alone triumphant) conclusion, breaks off equivocally in mid-chord.

Perhaps in no other work does Shostakovich speak so directly to his countrymen, and yet at the same time in a voice in which public and private anguish are so inextricably fused. One feels the pressure in it of a life lived in an era in which 75 million Russians died in war, famine and persecution: the most tragic decades ever endured by a single nation. No artist in history ever took upon himself such a terrifying expressive responsibility; none ever, except Mussorgsky, so vitally connected with the soul of a people.

For that reason, this isn't an easy work to project outside a Russian context, and for most of his performance conductor Charles Dutoit stayed merely on the surface of the music. The sustained string writing of the opening movement lacked tension; the downbeats in the second movement were blurred and fudged.

Midway through the third— "Eternal Memory"— the thought crossed my mind: He knows the notes, but he doesn't understand them.

Only in the finale (built on the same pattern as the finale of the Fifth Symphony) did Dutoit make a convincing case. The music begins with a furious rush that builds contrapuntally to a shattering climax, subsides into a reprise of material from the first movement with a plangent horn solo above hushed strings, and drives to an end with alternating major and minor thirds and steely percussion.

Even here, the reading lacked full amplitude, but at least conveyed energy and direction. The audience was again enthused. But it got only a fraction of what this score has to give.