Shostakovich Benjamin Zander Live from Carnegie Hall Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975) BOSTON SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN D MINOR, OP. 47 1. Conductor’s introductory remarks ... 7:29 PHILHARMONIC 2. Moderato – Allegro non troppo ..... 17:20 3. Allegretto ....................................... 5:27 YOUTH 4. Largo ............................................ 14:31 ORCHESTRA 5. Allegro non troppo ........................ 11:59 Total Running Time: 56 minutes Benjamin Zander conductor Go behind the scenes as the BPYO Shaping Future Leaders prepared for its Carnegie Hall debut at Through Music http://lin.mn/shostakovich Recorded at Carnegie Hall, New York City, USA 9 December 2013 Produced by James Blachly Recorded live by Jerry Bruck with Michael Karas Post-production by Antonio Oliart Cover image by Koren Reyes Design by gmtoucari.com 2 DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975) Shostakovich had, on Stalin’s instructions, SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN D MINOR, OP. 47 been savagely attacked for the supposedly pornographic and modernist excesses of his An artist-barbarian with a drowsy brush opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Blackens over the painting of a genius, This famous Pravda article appeared under And his lawless drawing the title ‘Muddle Instead of Music’. The Scribbles over it meaninglessly. various attacks that followed included an article condemning his ballet The Limpid But with the years the alien paints Stream, as well as a number of more or Flake off like old scales; less public threats. There were also threats The creation of the genius appears transmitted privately through ‘friends’ and Before us in its former beauty. colleagues. The composer was all too aware that his life was in danger. We are told that Thus the delusions fall away at this time and for some time afterwards From my worn-out soul, Shostakovich, like others at that unhappy And there spring up within it period, took to sleeping by the door of Visions of original, pure days his fl at; he did not wish the children to be awakened by his being arrested in the middle — Alexander Pushkin of the night. During all of 1936 and most of 1937 The above poem, Rebirth, was set to music he was under immense pressure. On the by Shostakovich in December 1936 as the one hand, this was a time when, in Anna opening of his Four Romances on Poems by Akhmatova’s words (from a poem dedicated Pushkin, Op. 46. Eleven months earlier to Shostakovich), ‘the last friends had turned 3 away their eyes’, and many of his colleagues Solomon Volkov in Testimony) that: were behaving almost as though he did not exist. On the other hand there was a clear I think it’s clear to everyone what happens atmosphere of expectation on the part of the in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created authorities, who were waiting for the composer under a threat, as in Boris Godunov. It’s as to humiliate himself, to admit his crimes and if someone were beating you with a stick declare himself ready to knuckle down to end saying: ‘Your business is rejoicing, the business of writing only the music that your business is rejoicing’, and you rise, others had deemed he should write. It was shakily, and go off muttering, ‘Our business against this sombre background that he sat is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing’. People down to compose his Fifth Symphony. And it who came to the premiere of the Fifth in the was against this background too that after his best of moods wept. new work had been given a triumphant fi rst performance on 21 November 1937, it was We can also now see that there might well be famously, although anonymously, described some truth in the report that Shostakovich as ‘A Soviet artist’s practical creative reply to himself agreed to the subtitle ‘A Soviet artist’s just criticism’. practical creative reply to just criticism’. It We have moved a long way from the days would have been utterly characteristic of where audiences (and, even more, conductors) this supremely ironic man to have done so. apparently imagined that the fi nale of this The symphony is indeed his awe-inspiringly Fifth Symphony was indeed just a vulgarly creative reply to criticism, as well as being optimistic apotheosis, a craven celebration of the only reply that was practically possible for Stalinist power. We can feel the obvious truth him. As for those adjectives ‘Soviet’ and ‘just’, of Shostakovich’s own comment (reported by their tawdry hollowness is now as audible as 4 the similar hollowness of the march in the and long-term harmonic structure, while symphony’s fi nale. at the same time (and for the fi rst time in To anyone who already knew this composer’s work) engaging with the Shostakovich’s music and who heard this greatest of models in our musical culture: work at its fi rst performance under Yevgeny with Mahler (with his Sixth and Ninth Mravinsky in Leningrad in November 1937, Symphonies especially), and, through Mahler, it must have been clear even from the with Beethoven. opening notes that here was an artist who The fi rst movement begins with music that had entered upon a new fi eld of experience, is both a slow introduction and the symphony’s a new way of listening and a new way exposition (‘exposing’, incidentally, the of making other people listen. After the material not only of the fi rst movement, but, childlike brilliance of the First Symphony, as it later turns out, of the other three as well). the experimental uproar of The Nose and Quite near the very opening, just after the fi rst the Second and Third Symphonies, and the four bars or so of jagged dotted rhythms, there intoxicated inventiveness and melodrama begins a rocking accompaniment in the lower of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (not strings over which the fi rst violins enter with to mention the Fourth Symphony, which as the symphony’s fi rst quiet suggestion of a yet no one had heard), here was something melody, a descent from A to D, but the fourth different again; a symphonism overpowering note of the phrase is not an E natural (which in the precision and unity of its form and in our ears would expect) but an unexpected the simultaneous concision and profusion E fl at. One need not be a musical analyst to of its detail, utterly original in its grasp of feel the power and logic of the way in which thematic identity and contrast as well as in the composer takes the listener on a journey its manipulation of extended development from the bitter-sweet experience of a single 5 ‘wrong’ note to the bitter-sweet experience of marked ‘Allegretto’, sets off at ♩ = 138, a whole, complex, but profoundly organized, which is exactly the same as the speed of the symphonic world. climax of the fi rst movement’s development; In a classical symphony, a slow in other words, the scherzo is taking off from introduction would typically lead to the fast the point where that development had left music of the fi rst movement proper. And so off. And although the quite new character it happens here, except that, as the composer of the second movement (with its almost has already introduced us to his main themes startling likeness to a Mahlerian Ländler) and ideas, the fast music, towards which the might seem a long way from the world of slow music gradually and subtly accelerates, the fi rst movement, as Shostakovich begins turns out to be already the movement’s to twist and turn his delirious fragments development section. Such a direct physical of triple-time dance music, they begin play with our conventional expectations of to yield up echoes and memories of the the rhetoric of symphonic architecture was earlier music. something that was subsequently to become For the slow movement in F sharp minor, typical of the mature Shostakovich. Shostakovich takes the unusual step of Incidentally, one of the most carefully dividing all the violins into three equal parts, organized aspects of this symphony is the as well as dividing the violas and cellos each matter of the measurement of pulse. The into two parts. The resulting eight-part string composer took extraordinary care with texture (including the double basses) is what his metronome specifi cations to indicate gives the string writing of this ‘Largo’ its how the inexorable acceleration towards peculiar feeling of mass and sonority. Like the catastrophe is to be achieved in performance. thematic material of the scherzo, the material Interestingly the scherzo, in A minor and of this movement, although it grows into 6 a sonata structure of a kind, also holds our lilting; the horror and the bombast has ebbed attention by suggesting a network of affi nities away. And the high strings are heard rocking and connections with the themes of the fi rst backwards and forwards on two notes. movement. In particular the descending This rocking fi gure, a gentle oscillation fi ve-note phrase with its bittersweet E fl at on two notes, is an idea that recurs again and from near the beginning of the whole work again in Shostakovich’s work, and is usually a reappears here, changing itself into a whole reference to one of the most famous moments variety of new guises. in Russian music, a moment from one of The last movement begins with that Shostakovich’s favourite works, Mussorgsky’s famous march ‘as though someone were Boris Godunov. The moment in the opera from beating you with a stick and saying: which the fi gure comes is the opening of the “Your business is rejoicing, your business monastery scene, where the curtain rises to is rejoicing”.’ As in the fi rst movement, reveal the chronicler-monk Pimen writing at Shostakovich takes tremendous care his desk.