GRAMOPHONE Review: Shostakovich Symphonies 1, 14, & 15 Boston Symphony Orchestra/Nelsons
Shostakovich’s first and last symphonies make for intriguing bedfellows: the beginning and end of a tortuous journey, heavy with irony and an all-pervasive sense of doubt and desolation. And yet there is always, one feels, a ‘last laugh’ – pointedly so in the case of the Fifteenth Symphony where the ticking percussion motif from the renegade Fourth Symphony comes back to taunt the naysayers. I love that it could never be silenced.
Nelsons’ account of the First Symphony comes across a little more earnestly than is customary. Expectation weighs more heavily and there’s gravitas in the teenager’s romantic flights of fancy – notably for oboe and solo cello in the slow movement and finale. Nelsons also paints the silent movie melodrama (so familiar from the composer’s picture palace improvisations) from the perspective of an older and wiser composer. The Boston Symphony woodwinds are very much the stars of said movie – you can all but see their facial expressions. Perhaps he is less of a prankster, too, in the circus antics of the scherzo where the solo piano – Petrushka-like -makes its presence felt. But it is all precisely ‘on point’ and there is a sabre-rattling excitement and intensity to the biggest climaxes, roaring trombones topping all that has gone before in the penultimate release of the finale.
We regress back to the nursery in the first movement of the final symphony – as witness that game of Tag to the tune of William Tell which so puzzled even seasoned critics when the piece first appeared. But is it really so surprising, this juxtaposition of the childish and the deadly serious? Again heavy irony. But Wagner, too? Self-quotation was nothing new for Shostakovich but this is something else, something new, something final. The adagio’s lugubrious brass chorale and solo trombone’s funeral oration are marvellously addressed here and Nelsons carries that pitch-black sentiment across the cynical scherzo into the second adagio, the finale. Decades of anguish are released in the final climax, and Nelsons nails its remorseless dissonance.
No question that this latest release represents the Nelsons cycle at its best. Regular readers may recall that I had issues with one or two earlier performances which for my money didn’t deliver much beyond a well-honed dynamism and panache. But that is most certainly not the case here and the shrewd inclusion of Rudolf Barshai’s transcription for string orchestra of the Eighth Quartet, including as it does a telling reference to the First Symphony, bleeds into the strings and percussion sonority of the astonishing Fourteenth Symphony to chilling effect.
Now there is no performance of this piece quite like the version from Rostropovich with Galina Vishnevskaya and Mark Reshetin where the words are stripped from the page with extraordinary abandon – but fellow Latvian Kristine Opolais and Ukranian bass Alexander Tsymbalyuk have the essential whiff of theatre about them and Nelsons and his engineers scrutinise the inky black economy of the scoring with the kind of immediacy that puts the listener ‘inside’ the sound in ways that a concert hall perspective never can. You can feel as well as hear the rosiny growl of those string basses and percussion which pops and punctuates so startlingly.
The drama of poems like Apollinaire’s ‘Loreley’ and ‘Le Suicide’ is truly ‘in one’s face’, haunting parallels drawn between the close of the former, where we seem to be reliving Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’s final moments, and the plaintive Ophelia-like chanting of the latter. And has a composer ever conveyed the relentless marking of time for the everyman of political prisoners in ‘A la Santé’ quite like the central interlude of this starkest of settings?
They are like unforgiving stares, these poems, but more startling than even that, the nature of their deployment, the way they impact upon each other, is entirely symphonic. You can feel Nelsons thinking – as I am now – what a composer.
