Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)
Six Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva, Op 143 (1973)
Symphony No 14, Op 135 (1969)
Elizabeth Atherton (soprano)
Jess Dandy (contralto)
Peter Rose (bass)
BBC Philharmonic/John Storgårds
rec. 2022, MediaCityUK, Salford, UK
Chandos CHSA5310 SACD [75]
John Storgårds is perhaps the first conductor on records to acknowledge that the last five Shostakovich symphonies form a series unto themselves, apart from the ten that preceded them. Attention tends to fixate on the first half of Shostakovich’s career, when the brilliant Wunderkind developed into a mature master against the dramatic backdrop of revolution, world war, and a complex relationship with his country’s government. Yet the final half of his career was arguably the most dynamic musically, an outcome that may have been influenced by the self-doubt and writer’s blocks that regularly punctuated his life during this period, to say nothing of his precipitously declining health. How else to explain the radical shift from the neo-Mussorgskian nationalism of Symphonies Nos 11–13 to the spectral No 15, an astonishing and chilling work seemingly assembled from the detritus of music history? Within less than two decades, Shostakovich traversed stylistic light years that most composers cannot begin to cover in a lifetime.
Between these works is Symphony No 14; its preoccupation with death, motivic use of tone rows, idiosyncratic form, and indebtedness to the Polish avant-garde (especially Lutosławski’s Musique funèbre) marking it as a typical exemplar of Shostakovich’s late period. Yet it took this superb Storgårds recording to reveal to me how this symphony is as much an arrival as a departure. “Malagueña” here evokes the Spanish-inflected dance from the second movement trio in the Suite for Two Pianos, Op 6, albeit defiled and robbed of its vernal enchantment. Storgårds’ rendering of “The Zaporozhian Cossacks’ Reply to the Sultan of Constantinople”, with the muscular low strings of the BBC Philharmonic hammering the downbeats with terrifying force, makes clear that this was the ultimate of the furious scherzi that featured in Shostakovich’s music as early as the Two Pieces for String Octet, Op 11. Mussorgsky, whose presence was so keenly felt in Shostakovich’s music of the late 1950s and early 1960s, is palpable once more.
Storgårds’ recording also illuminates qualities that were new to late Shostakovich, especially the fragile beauty and lyricism that flicker in its most moving pages, such as in “O Delvig, Delvig!”, with bass Peter Rose aptly conveying its wounded Schubertian tenderness. And where since Haitink’s Concertgebouw recording have the strings in this symphony sounded as uncomfortably alluring in “De Profundis” and “The Poet’s Death” as they do here? Soprano Elizabeth Atherton’s disquieting performances of those movements and of “The Suicide” suggest to the listener that death can come as both friend and seductress. Or unhinged bitch, as Atherton demonstrates in “On Watch”, where she viciously snarls off the line “V krovosmesheniy i v smerti stat’ krasivoy” (“In incest and in death I want to become beautiful”). In symphony, as in life, beauty and horror often inhabit the same being.
Contralto Jess Dandy intuits and discloses the strength at the heart of the Six Poems of Marina Tsevateya, the symphony’s discmate, delivering the most opulent performance of this song cycle since Irina Bogacheva’s (latest reissue on Venezia CDVE00513). Her vocal effulgence in “To Anna Akhmatova” convinces one that, in music at least, hope can thrive in the midst of death – a surprising sentiment from the same composer whose penultimate symphony concluded with Rilke’s verses, “All-powerful is death … [it] awaits for us and thirsts for us—and weeps for us.” Perhaps Shostakovich was also aware of the poet’s more hopeful words to the young Franz Xaver Kappus: “The future stands still, but we move in infinite space.”
Néstor Castiglione
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