GRAMOPHONE Review: Shostakovich Symphony No. 11 ‘The Year 1905’ – BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/Storgårds

Each time I hear the opening of this symphony – in filmic terms a long slow pan across the frozen forecourt of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg – I immediately think of countless grainy black and white documentaries depicting war and revolution, though not necessarily the one invoked here from ‘the year 1905’. It’s the programatic nature of the 11th Symphony that has prompted negative criticism over the years, ‘filmic’ being used as a term of denigration. 

But time has revealed a masterpiece of sorts where the ‘directness’ of expression and more especially the use of revolutionary songs as thematic leitmotifs goes to the very heart of powerful protest – the resistance of state repression whenever and wherever it shows itself. The long cor anglais solo at the heart of the finale – channelling the revolutionary song ‘Bare Your Heads’ – might possibly be the single most profound utterance in all Shostakovich. 

This is a resounding performance – and a timely reminder of the same team’s triumph with the piece at last year’s Proms – but more significantly it is a searching, very inward reading, too. John Storgards favours an expansive wide-screen approach underlining the work’s theatricality and lending the big set pieces an implacable power. I’m thinking immediately of the graphic ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre sequence in the second movement (much beloved of documentary film makers) – the dogged, relentless fugue exploding into a brutal tattoo for the entire percussion battery. The sequence encourages a variety of approaches – a dramatic speeding up or slowing down as the percussion let rip – but Storgards keeps his deliberate tempo emphatically and remorselessly on course throughout the whole sequence emphasising the pitiless machine-like brutality of it. Especially telling are the rising chromatic grimaces in the trombones as the Tsar’s forces menacingly confront the peaceful protest. Scarifying. 

The slow movement – ‘In Memoriam’ – contains one of the most transformative moments in the entire Shostakovich symphonic canon and that’s the major key modulation into what would be the opening words of the revolutionary song ‘You Fall As a Victim’ – ‘Welcome the free world of liberty’ – radiant in the violins. Storgards and the BBC Philharmonic strings make something quite special of this – a moment of hope and light amidst the surrounding darkness. 

Last (but very much not least) the tolling bells of the closing pages and the biggest question of all ‘for whom do they toll’. For this performance – and for the aforementioned Prom date where they thrillingly rang out from the belfry of the Royal Albert Hall – Storgards and the orchestra deploy four church bells (on loan from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic), to tremendous effect: an invocation at once ominous and exultant and defiant. Strogards lets them ring on after the final chord a la Rostropovich – the one thing here I’m not entirely convinced by. For me the abrupt cut-off is more overtly dramatic. Still, a terrific performance and a terrific sounding disc.