SHOSTAKOVICH SYMPHONY NO. 11 ‘THE YEAR 1905’ JOHN STORGÅRDS Dmitri Shostakovich, 1958 Shostakovich, Dmitri AKG Images, London / Sputnik Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 – 1975) Symphony No. 11, Op. 103 ‘The Year 1905’ (1956 – 57) in G minor • in g-Moll • en sol mineur 1 1 The Palace Square. Adagio – 17:40 2 2 The Ninth of January. Allegro – Adagio – Allegro – Adagio – 21:03 3 3 In Memoriam. Adagio – Poco più mosso – Tempo I – 12:16 4 4 The Tocsin. Allegro non troppo – Allegro – Moderato – Adagio – Allegro 15:44 TT 66:45 BBC Philharmonic Yuri Torchinsky leader John Storgårds 3 Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11, Op. 103 ‘The Year 1905’ In the summer of 1956 Soviet schoolchildren speech (the Poles won relative autonomy, found that their history exams had especially in the arts, while the Hungarians been cancelled. The reason was that were crushed). Nikita Khrushchev had made a so-called He then did a curious thing. In the ‘secret speech’ in February of that following year he completed a symphony year to the twentieth Communist Party commemorating a famous atrocity in pre- Conference, denouncing Stalin and what communist Russia – the original Bloody he euphemistically termed the ‘personality Sunday, in fact – the events of which are worth cult’. Suddenly history was not what every recapping. 1905 was a year of revolutionary child and young adult in the Soviet Union had upheaval. On 9 January (22 January by the been taught it was, and an army of authors Western calendar) a crowd of workers and was drafted in to re-write it (the process their families, estimated at between 5,000 and would be repeated thirty-five years later in 16,000 in total, converged on the Winter Palace connection with glasnost and the collapse of in St Petersburg. They were unarmed, carrying Communism and the Soviet Union). icons and portraits of the Tsar and singing Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 – 1975) had hymns, and intending to present a petition little to unlearn, however. He had grown up to Nicholas II, appealing over the heads of in a family with highly developed social and local officials and bosses to alleviate the political awareness; he had had abundant misery that overdue and perhaps over-hasty contact with the free-thinking cultural industrial development was inflicting on intelligentsia in the relatively non-doctrinaire them. The Tsar had been advised to leave 1920s; and he had been at the sharp end of the capital, and no one had been delegated Stalinist repression for more than twenty to receive the petition. After the customary years, including career-threatening disgraces warning shots failed to disperse the crowd, in 1936 and 1948. He also kept up to date with the authorities lost their nerve, resorting the rumblings of dissension in Poland and to cavalry charges and infantry fire, which Hungary in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s left some 200 dead and 500 wounded (the 4 figures were wildly exaggerated by the were deceiving themselves. Their story, Western press at the time and by the Soviets only safe to tell since glasnost, backs in later years). Word spread that the Tsar, up the comments first aired in 1979 by the ‘Little Father’, had betrayed his people, Solomon Volkov in his purported write-up and this single event did more to imbue the of Shostakovich’s memoirs, Testimony, to workers of Russia with revolutionary fire the effect that the Eleventh Symphony is an than decades of agitation and propaganda Aesopian fable, ‘really’ commenting on the had done. suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. The Eleventh Symphony was, then, This is the line that many today would an act of seemingly politically correct probably like to believe, and the burden of commemoration, bolstered by the quotation hearsay evidence lends it some credence. Yet within it of some nine revolutionary songs a lawyer for the official side would have little and an accessible, film-score-ish idiom, close difficulty in finding inconsistencies and self- to the kind which Shostakovich had long serving mendacities in many of Shostakovich’s since mastered in film scores and official character witnesses. The habit of not letting cantatas. All this seemed to represent a truth get in the way of a good story is as backtracking from the complexities of the deeply ingrained in Russia as anywhere else Tenth Symphony, of 1953, and a conscious and was never confined to Stalinists, and attempt to curry favour with authority. This the urge to cast Shostakovich as a crypto- was, after all, the kind of symphony that dissident is not the same thing as proof that officials had been asking of him for years, he was one. and to all intents and purposes it appeared There is a third possibility to consider: to be an unimpeachably conformist way of that Shostakovich may have been speaking celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the against any kind of state repression, and that 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Which is how it was the power of his statement comes more from initially received – with delight by advocates how it is focused, musically speaking, than of Socialist Realism and with dismay by its from what it is targeted against. At any rate the detractors, in Russia and outside. nature of the target, or the lack of it, remains a It is possible that Shostakovich intended matter for individual listeners to decide. the symphony that Party-line way. But only The Eleventh Symphony is sometimes if many of those closest to him at the time dubbed ‘a film-score without the film’, and 5 it is true that the music sometimes seems to ‘Bare your heads’ (with reference to the move at the rate of a camera panning across a traditional mark of respect for the Tsar). vast open space. So it is in ‘The Palace Square’, For the third movement, ‘In Memoriam’, which certainly feels like an evocation of Shostakovich turned to one of the best dawn on the bright but bitterly cold morning known of all revolutionary songs: ‘You fell of Bloody Sunday itself. The opening musical as a victim’, familiar from many a Soviet ideas are the only ones in the symphony that film soundtrack when the scene is the are not actually quotes or derivations from funeral of a martyr to the communist cause, well-known revolutionary songs, and they and actually used for some time in the will prove crucial to the overall design. The West in funeral services for communist square itself is memorably depicted in glassy sympathisers. In the aftermath of the long, open fifths on the strings, punctuated by gloomy opening, the violins follow with ominous timpani triplets that will become the opening phrase of ‘Welcome, the free a kind of leitmotiv for the Crowd. Quiet world of liberty’, musically a fine example Mahlerian trumpet fanfares then depict the of Shostakovich’s mastery of Schubertian warning signals before the infantry open major-key pathos. fire. Flutes give out the revolutionary song Three more revolutionary songs feature ‘Listen’ (the text of which runs: ‘Like an act in the finale, which is subtitled ‘The Tocsin’ of betrayal, like the conscience of a (alarm-bell). These are ‘Rage, you tyrants’, tyrant, / the autumn night is dark’), and ‘Courage, comrades, on your feet!’, and cellos and basses soon follow with ‘The ‘Enemy whirlwinds blow against us’, the Prisoner’ (‘The night is dark... the wall of last being set to the famous Polish tune the prison is strong’). ‘Warschawianka’. All manner of cyclic The second movement, ‘The Ninth of reminiscences from earlier movements are January’, is a brutal scherzo substitute in built into this finale, along with a quote from two sections, depicting the assembly of the 1951 operetta about the events of 1905, the crowds and the massacre itself. Over a Ogonki (Sparks), by one of Shostakovich’s variant of the Crowd leitmotif, clarinet and most gifted pupils, Georgy Sviridov. Finally, bassoon intone part of the song ‘O thou, the warning signals seem to be directed, our Tsar, little father!’; the later brass theme allegorically and prophetically, towards the comes from the beginning of the same poem: future, and the Crowd theme dominates the 6 symphonic canvas like a swarm of vengeful the performance of landmark classics and bees. The four movements are played without little-heard repertoire rarities. One of the a break. BBC’s six orchestras and choirs, it also appears annually at the BBC Proms, performs © 2020 David Fanning across the North of England, tours frequently to Europe and beyond, and records regularly Note for Chandos, its catalogue now extending to For perhaps the first time for sixty years, this more than 250 recordings and more than one recording uses four church bells, on loan from the million albums sold. Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, rather than In October 2018 the orchestra appointed the standard orchestral tubular bells. Church bells the Israel-born Omer Meir Wellber, may be heard on the earliest recording of the Eleventh internationally recognised as one of the Symphony, by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra most exciting young conductors working under Yevgeny Mravinsky in 1959, and may therefore today, as its new Chief Conductor – a move be presumed to have the composer’s approval. John that Richard Morrison (The Times) hailed Storgårds has chosen to let them ring on after the end as ‘arguably the most inspired musical of the work, an option also favoured in performance by appointment the BBC has made for years’. Mstislav Rostropovich. The orchestra maintains strong relationships with the Finnish conductor and violinist Based in Salford, Greater Manchester and John Storgårds, its Chief Guest Conductor, having earned worldwide recognition as the brilliant young maestro Ben Gernon, one of the most adventurous, innovative, its Principal Guest Conductor, and the and versatile orchestras in Europe, the BBC former BBC Young Musician of the Year Philharmonic brings a rich and diverse variety Mark Simpson, its Composer in Association.