Dmitri Shostakovich
      Symphony No. 11 "The Year 1905"

London Symphony Orchestra/Mstislav Rostropovich.
LSO Live LSO0030  TT: 72:24

Summary for the Busy Executive: Tract for the Times, Tovarich!

It amazes me how high Shostakovich's stock has risen in my lifetime.
Forty years ago, most western critics viewed him as a talent sucked dry
by the Soviets.  Even during the Forties, a time of the composer's popular
success and perhaps in reaction against it, Virgil Thomson slammed the
Piano Quintet as a simulacrum of great music, aping the gestures but
missing the substance.  Following Bartok's humorless lead, many writers
and composers began busily hammering nails into the coffin of the Seventh.
The Tenth represented a temporary spike in Shostakovich's reputation.
Believe it or not, very few could get their minds around the fact that
Shostakovich had indeed composed something so good.  Most of them treated
it as a fluke.  In Robert Simpson's influential book The Symphony: Elgar
to the Present Day, Robert Layton, in a burst of relative empathy, calls
the Eleventh "a lowering of symphonic sights," compared to the Tenth and
wonders whether the Thirteenth (unheard at this point in the west) will
return to the level of the Tenth or continue the sad decline of the
Eleventh and Twelfth ("the same revolutionaries making the same speeches").
More than a few compared the Eleventh to movie music, and they weren't
handing out compliments.

Some of this devaluation one can trace to different ideas of what
a symphony should do.  Western European aesthetics from the Twenties
through the postwar era has usually affirmed Stravinsky's stated position
(actually, a crib of Arthur Lourie): music means nothing other than
itself.  The notion would have surprised Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, and
even Schoenberg.  I wonder how much of this attitude, in the postwar
years at any rate, comes down to a relatively secure political situation
in the west.  One might suffer existential Angst, but one wasn't thrown
into jail or psychiatric ward for it.  Sometimes you can afford pure
aesthetics.  Shostakovich wasn't really so lucky.  The political mingled
with the personal, especially since the Stalinist authorities enthusiastically
screened his work for signs of political deviance.  Yikes.  If the threat
of death or disappearance in a gulag happened to me, you can bet I'd
take it personally.  However, most now see that Shostakovich's symphonic
works, no matter how evocative, don't describe.  They undoubtedly contain
programs, as a Mahler symphony does (Shostakovich learned a lot from
Mahler), but most of them work fine as "absolute" music.  Furthermore,
it's often very difficult to decide what the program is.  The Eleventh,
of course, carries the subtitle "In the Year 1905," when Tsarist troops
massacred a crowd of peaceful demonstrators.  The symphony contains
several Revolutionary songs of the time as well as Shostakovich's own
settings of Revolutionary texts.  Soviet officialdom took the symphony
as praise.  One can legitimately wonder, however, about Shostakovich's
attitude.  After all, the program in general talks of a government
violently oppressing its citizens.  Is Shostakovich calling for another
revolution, this time against the Soviet tsars?  Who knows?  Opinions
abound and controversies have sprung up, particularly since the publication
of Volkov's Testimony.  As far as I can tell, however, nobody's settled
anything yet.

I know very little about Soviet history, but I've nevertheless always
found Shostakovich's Eleventh a powerful, moving work.  Indeed, it caused
me to re-evaluate the composer's symphonies, which, like those of Brahms,
used to lull me into a coma.  I couldn't shake the sense of cheapness I
got from the composer's music, that he settled for easy outs and easy
ideas.  I imagine Mahler's first audiences felt some of this toward those
symphonies.  At any rate, Shostakovich's Eleventh served to wake me up
and to take a new listen.  Perhaps it helped that the first performance
I heard was Stokowski's with the Houston Symphony, a landmark not only
in Stokowski's catalogue but also in the western appreciation of
Shostakovich.  Stokowski took to the Eleventh, so full of dramatic
extremes (tempi, dynamics, and so on), like duck soup.  People usually
talk about Stokowski as a master of orchestral color -- which, of course,
he was -- but that concern always related to the emotional content of
the music.  Even when Stokowski changed a composer's instrumentation
(following the practice of many conductors of his and the previous
generation, he at times silently substituted his own scoring -- in
Beethoven symphonies and, most notoriously, in Stravinsky's Le Sacre,
for example), he did so for reasons of achieving greater emotional impact.
He viewed his efforts as helping the composer realize the music behind
the notes.  Critics viewed this as ego -- Stokowski had one -- but I
tend to think of him as selfless, a servant of the composer, even when
I strongly disagree with or even raise my eyebrows at what he's done.
At any rate, Stokowski was very concerned about the color and dynamic
range for recording sessions of his account of the Eleventh, even though
he didn't alter Shostakovich's instruments.  Indeed, it was that very
scoring that aroused his special concern for the engineering.  The pains
he took justify themselves many times over in a recording that remains
a sonic and interpretive benchmark for this piece (available on EMI
65206).  One might prefer Mravinsky (the recording from the Sixties) or
Jansons, for example, but I'd bet the Stokowski would be right behind.

As for Rostropovich, this is one of his best recordings (conductor or
player) and right up there in exalted company.  Compared to Stokowski,
he's a bit restrained (this is a live recording, by the way), but the
symphony can bear and can benefit from that kind of approach.  The
symphony consists of four large movements -- slow-fast-slow-fast --
the first two over twenty minutes apiece.  The opening adagio, "Palace
Square," supposedly depicts the petitioners waiting in the winter snow.
As a piece of symphonic construction, this movement alone gives the lie
to the portrait of Shostakovich as shoddy workman.  I've always thought
this movement one of Shostakovich's best.  Among other things, it pulls
off the feat of "waiting for something to happen" without the losing the
listener's attention.  Although in no classical form, it is, like Wagner's
operas, genuinely symphonic and, what's more, coherently arches over a
great expanse with just five little ideas: two revolutionary songs, an
idea based on the melodic interval of a major second, some spectral
fanfares, and finally a motto, first heard on the timpani, carried through
the entire work.  Even the songs get symphonic treatment.  Shostakovich
breaks these up into their smaller constituents and varies and recombines
those.  Furthermore, all these ideas carry over into other movements,
where in new guises they carry new meanings.  This is symphonic thinking
of a very high order.  As I say, I don't really need the image of the
crowd standing silently in the square, despite its power, for the movement
to do its emotional work on me.  Shostakovich creates a psychic drama,
independent of a particular program.

All the anticipation that the opening movement builds has to go somewhere.
The allegro second movement, "9 January," follows without a break - a
scurrying figure in the strings based on the motto.  A new idea shows
up (based on one of Shostakovich's Ten Choral Poems on Revolutionary
Texts) for extended treatment.  Unexpectedly, the opening of the entire
symphony returns - calm before the storm - before a savage fugato based
on the timpani motto theme breaks out.  The theme is rather constricted
in its range, and this emphasizes a kind of mindless fury in the music.
The rhythms become mechanistic and brutal, heavy on the percussion.  The
fury dissipates, and the movement ends with the "Palace Square" music.

The third movement, a funereal "In memoriam" adagio, opens with incredibly
soft, halting plucks on the lower strings which turn into something very
much like a passacaglia ground.  The musically interesting thing about
it, however, is that the "melody" line above it isn't really a set of
variations, but a long, tender melody -- yet another Revolution song.
This transforms into a dead march, first for strings, then for low winds
and brass.  The music builds to an insistent climax, where the opening
bass line comes to the fore.  The opening passage returns, as (you would
think) a kind of benediction, but then Shostakovich startles you with a
call to arms, as the last movement ("Tocsin: Allegro non troppo") suddenly
bursts in.  To me, it's too hysterical and mechanistically rhythmic to
be heroic, as the composer may have intended and certainly Party officials
inferred.  But this is a feature, not a bug.  Its insistence on brass
fanfares and the shape of its main theme remind me of the finale of
Mahler's First.  Shostakovich, in his last works, became self-revelatory.
We now know that certain pieces, like the William Tell overture, were
almost iconic for him.  I think that Mahler movement may have been one
of those icons.  After all, the finale of Shostakovich's Fifth also
evokes it.  After the march has spent itself, the "Palace Square" music
returns, accompanying a cor anglais singing one of the earlier Revolutionary
songs.  This leads to a trombone singing another, this time against
angrily skirling winds and hammering percussion.  Here we arrive at
genuinely heroic music, but the symphony doesn't end on triumphant note
- no great blazing major chord in the brass.  It's loud, but it's bare
and austere.

This progression strikes me as rather odd and unconventional.
Something far more interesting and more genuine goes on here than "the
heroic people's Socialist struggle for the proletariat continues."  The
interruption of the first march, for example, seems a lament not simply
for the events of 1905, but for subsequent history, and the final passage
a shaking of the fist at the current regime.  Indeed, if I thought of
a program at all for this symphony, it would be an anti-Soviet one.
Fortunately, music's evocative power doesn't translate readily into
portraiture and historical thesis.  The rhetoric of the movement, however,
surprises and runs deeper than what the opening leads you to expect.

Rostropovich does a fantastic job.  He not only shows you the architecture
of the symphony like nobody else's business, but he also delivers an
emotional wallop. This is a subtle reading of a work which -- who knew?
-- repays subtlety.  Lines are shaped in amazing detail.  The LSO matches
him, responding beautifully and sensitively to the turns of phrase and
argument.  Rostropovich of course knew the composer -- which guarantees
nothing, incidentally.  However, this performance seems to invoke the
figure of Shostakovich himself.  And the account's wonderfully recorded,
besides.  The combination of sonics and interpretation move this CD, as
far as I'm concerned, to the front of the line.  It cuts in front of
both Stokowski and Mravinsky.

Steve Schwartz