A cutting history lesson from the BSO, and gorgeous imperfection from H+H
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Symphony No. 8 was completed in 1943 and thus pre-dates the Violin Concerto by five years. The composer had already seen several friends and relatives sent to the Soviet Union's infamous gulags for alleged political crimes, and supposedly he kept a packed suitcase ready in case the secret police came for him. However, with the success of his patriotic Symphony No. 7, 'Leningrad', Shostakovich had rallied Soviet spirits and sustained his amicable official relationship with Party leadership, which he'd labored to repair after the 1936 denunciation of his opera '
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According to the program notes by Harlow Robinson, Symphony No. 8 was found insufficiently heroic by the Party officials, who craved unambiguous 'Socialist realist' musical praise of its ideologies, but the composer faced no immediate consequences. However, as Shostakovich worked on the Violin Concertoin 1948, he and other high profile Soviet composers were ordered to confess their 'mistakes' of writing music that failed to toe the Party line.
The Violin Concerto's musical structure was already unorthodox, its affects alternately dark and brooding or grotesque, and it contained distinctly Jewish musical themes at a time when antisemitism was on the rise in the Soviet Union. Out of self-preservation, Shostakovich withheld the concerto from performance until after Stalin's death in 1953, and put bread on the table by writing unassailably Stalin-praising concert pieces and film scores.
In the Handel and Haydn Society's program book later that day, musicologist Teresa Neff wrote that 'surely part of the magic of music lives in its ability to speak differently to each listener, and to the same listener in different ways.' Friday's BSO program demonstrated that that magic, more than any specific mode of musical expression, was surely what Stalin and his apparatchiks sought to quash. If music can speak differently to each listener, there's nothing to stop it from conveying ideas that threaten power.
Skride, who will appear in Leipzig with the BSO, landed her bow on the strings for the violin concerto's sleepless Nocturne with the silent fluidity of an owl on the hunt, and the electrifying restlessness only intensified through the grotesque carnival of the Scherzo. Behind her, the large orchestra played like a tight band, the musical texture densely woven. The beginning of the third movement is one of the concerto's rare moments when the soloist does not play, and the BSO brass intoned the introduction with awesome weight, as if pronouncing judgement.
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The soloist was sublime in the third movement's incendiary Passacaglia and the subsequent visceral cadenza, spiking the repeated musical ideas with mercurial accents and rhythms. The final Burlesque flagged by comparison. But that concerto is a marathon, and the cadenza is its Heartbreak Hill. Many a solid violinist has run low on gas around that point. She'll have another run at it in Leipzig.
Symphony No. 8 bristled with lean intensity, and on the heels of the Violin Concerto the common points between the pieces were easy to hear. Abrupt textural and rhythmic shifts were plentiful, and the vicious circus conveyed by the second movement's militaristic march sounded quite familiar. Nelsons leaned into the final movement's fake-out, as it seemed to be building towards triumph (as the Party authorities would have expected) then swerved into quiet and uneasy reflection. More's the pity these pieces don't share a program in Leipzig; history sings in these notes.
06bso - Handel and Haydn Society artistic director Jonathan Cohen leading the orchestra at Symphony Hall. (Joseph Sedarski)
Joseph Sedarski
Later that day, in the same hall, the Handel and Haydn Society concluded its season with artistic director Jonathan Cohen on the podium and soloist Kristian Bezuidenhout at the fortepiano. The evening began with the society's teenage choruses performing Schubert's 'An die Sonne': a very difficult piece for young voices, and they made a heroic effort which Bezuidenhout gamely accompanied.
Mozart's incidental music from the play 'Thamos, King of Egypt' was thoroughly entertaining, as was Haydn's Symphony No. 82, 'The Bear.' Perhaps anything would seem cheerful after a slew of Shostakovich, but a distinct joie de vivre seemed to spark behind the sound. This is what you get when you treat 200+-year-old music as a living tradition: Haydn's humor shone through the ample false endings of his symphony's final movement, some of which even got a few claps from the audience before they realized the orchestra was still playing. Centuries later, he's still full of surprises.
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Paul Lewis, one of the greatest living players of Beethoven, once told me that if he were to make breakfast for the composer, he'd make 'a mess of eggs.' There are as many ways to approach Beethoven's music as there are to prepare said eggs, and even though it was only a few weeks ago that
06bso - Fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout. (Joseph Sedarski)
Joseph Sedarski
The tuning of intervals on the fortepiano is somewhat different than that of a modern piano, and the piece resounded with little strains of blithe dissonance that nonetheless never detracted from the whole, but gave it an air of wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept of beauty in the impermanent and imperfect.
In the second movement, which sets up piano and orchestra as adversaries, Cohen led the orchestra through forceful and brisk retorts to Bezuidenhout's delicate tunes; the finale was all mischief and fun. In a side room, there was a
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As an encore, Bezuidenhout graced the audience with another thoughtful turn around the Regier's keyboard: the songful slow movement from Beethoven's Sonata No. 4.
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA / HANDEL AND HAYDN SOCIETY
At Symphony Hall.
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at
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