Valery Gergiev conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra

The particular five-year period Gergiev chose was not, I would hazard, by accident: 1940-1945, the period of what the Russians still call the Great Patriotic War, and the rest of us World War II. That was the war Russia fought to defeat the Nazis and paid for with the loss of some 10 percent of its population. It was a war we thought ended in 1945, but which has had a recent afterlife in the proxy struggle now raging in Ukraine between Russia and the European Union. Gergiev, whose concerts have been the subject of protests and, in some cases, disruptions for his outspoken support of his country’s position in that conflict (including this week’s in Philadelphia), may have been making his own rejoinder with this program.

World War II: Good for the symphony

Whatever else may be said about World War II, it was certainly good for the symphony, with such works produced during it as Vaughan Williams’s Fifth symphony and Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem (ironically, commissioned by imperial Japan) in Britain; the Honegger Second in France; the first four symphonies — one a year between 1942 and 1945 — by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu; the Fifth and Sixth of Roy Harris, the Second of Walter Piston, the Fourth of Howard Hanson, and the Jeremiah Symphony of Leonard Bernstein in America. By far the largest output, however, came from Russia: three symphonies by Shostakovich and three by Myaskovsky; two by Stravinsky; and one apiece by Prokofiev and Khachaturian. This was not adventitious; Stalin wanted heroic symphonies to boost wartime morale and commemorate Russian sacrifice, and the Shostakovich Leningrad Symphony became, notoriously, a consciously exploited propaganda resource for the Soviet cause.

Of course, neither of Stravinsky’s wartime symphonies — the Symphony in C (1938-40) and the Symphony in Three Movements (1945) — had anything directly to do with Russia beyond the composer’s ethnicity. He had lived abroad for decades and insisted that his abstract music, indeed all such music, had nothing to do with anything beyond itself, and could be meaningfully discussed only in formal terms. The latter and better-known work has often been taken for a response to the war, and the sudden C major chord that ends it as an affirmation of victory. The same can’t be said of the Symphony in C, which is most frequently encountered in the ballet George Balanchine set to it. It was this work, however, that Gergiev chose to begin his program.

Certainly, both the larger tragedy of the war and searing personal losses — the deaths within months of Stravinsky’s mother, his first wife, and his daughter Ludmila — shadowed the composition of the symphony, each of whose four movements were written in a different locale as he sought refuge from the Nazis: Paris, Switzerland, Massachusetts, and Hollywood. Stravinsky boasted that none of these ordeals was reflected in the music, which had itself been a portable refuge from them, and Balanchine’s ballet, his most serenely neoclassical collaboration with Stravinsky, seemed to bear this out. Other composers might wear their hearts on their sleeves, or try to; Stravinsky refused to expose his at all.

Gergiev’s performance set out to rebut the composer. His driving rhythms and choppy, emphatic phrasing seemed designed to Russify the music and bring an underlying agitation to the surface. In this, he was only fitfully successful. You can play the Symphony in C as Russian music; Gergiev demonstrated that. But you can’t make Russian music out of it, and Stravinsky, I suspect, would have hated the whole show.

Victory at last

In opting for a Shostakovich symphony for his program, Gergiev had only one choice, the Ninth, because its two wartime predecessors are both of Mahlerian length and would dominate if not consume a program containing three works. The Seventh and Eighth symphonies, respectively of 1941 and 1943, are clearly tragic works on the grand scale, although full of ambiguity as always with Shostakovich. The Ninth was to be the capstone of the trilogy, at least as the commissars conceived it, and here at last — the war now victoriously concluded in 1945 — the composer could give joyous voice to the People’s triumph. What Shostakovich offered instead was nothing of the kind, but, instead, a five-movement work of modest length that shifted gears jarringly, punctuated with sardonic laughter, and wholly bereft of any patriotic narrative. If the Stravinsky symphony was pointedly intended not to express the mood of war, the Shostakovich Ninth likewise appeared to avert itself from the horrors past to frolic in the light of a new day.

I think in fact that this, the conventional approach to the score, is a serious misreading, and although no amount of coaxing will make a tragedy of it, it nonetheless bears the stamp of the war throughout both in what it does and doesn’t say. An example is the transmogrification of the principal theme of the finale, which returns at the end as a brutal march, the (supposed) tread of the Nazi invader from the first movement of the Seventh symphony in even more banal and sinister form, except that — wait a minute, haven’t the Nazis been defeated, and what is their monkey business doing here? It was a question the more perceptive members of the audiences in Moscow and Leningrad might well have asked, and the answer to which the commissars clearly did not like.

Restoring dynamism

Here, Gergiev’s search for hidden meanings paid real dividends, especially with the resources of Richard Woodhams’s oboe and Daniel Matsukawa’s bassoon at his disposal in their extended solos. What treasures these gentlemen are. But the real payoff in Gergiev’s approach came with Prokofiev’s Fifth symphony, composed with the war still on in 1944 but with victory clearly in sight. Prokofiev had not composed a symphony in 15 years, and he treated this work — again, according to received interpretation — as a preemptive strike against the triumphalist symphony anticipated from his archrival Shostakovich.

The Fifth is now an established repertory piece, comfortably settled into middle age in most Western performances, but Gergiev was determined to restore the score’s original dynamism, drama, and surprise, and in this he succeeded remarkably well. His Fifth was a revelation, a far more complex, passionate, and sonically thrilling score than the one we’ve become accustomed to. There were a couple of moments when, ridden hard, the orchestra buckled, but for the most part the members rose to an exciting challenge and clearly seemed to appreciate it.

The audience responded with a prolonged ovation, which Gergiev, evidently pleased after his more controversial receptions, graciously if a bit imperially acknowledged. The man can shake music loose from his fingertips, as he seemed literally to do, conducting without a baton and arranging the strings in highly unorthodox fashion, with the violin sections divided between the wings of the stage, cellos in the middle, and basses to the far left. It worked.