Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103, ‘The Year 1905’ (1957)
London Symphony Orchestra/Gianandrea Noseda
rec. live, 24 November 2022, Barbican Hall, London
LSO Live LSO0888 [63]

In a particularly informative, concise and well-researched booklet note, Andrew Huth informs us that Maxim Shostakovich, the composer’s son, said this: ‘My father did not write programme music in the realistic sense except in films, of course.’ When dealing with a symphony that has a name, and whose four movements are entitled, respectively, ‘The Palace Square’, ‘The 9th of January’, ‘In Memoriam’ and ‘Tocsin’ – though the movement titles in my Boosey & Hawkes score differ slightly from these – many might find that statement difficult to accept. His point, though, is that those titles may well refer to specific events, but that the composer’s aim was to produce a statement that could be seen as universal. Huth identifies the issue dealt with here as any ‘time or place where protest is crushed by violence.’ There is another hypothesis, however, and one that cannot be ignored: much of the music was composed during and following the Hungarian people’s attempted revolution in 1956 that was brutally and murderously put down by the Soviet authorities. This possibility is made fairly explicit in Testimony, Shostakovich’s ‘memoirs’ ‘as related to and edited by’ Solomon Volkov, and though this source is now discredited there are others, more plausible, that support the argument. In the booklet note accompanying one of the work’s earliest recordings, by André Cluytens (1958, Testament – review) Robert Layton quotes a more reliable source, as well as remembering that Maxim, present at the dress rehearsal, is reported to have asked his father ‘Papa, what if they hang you for this?’

Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony was for a long time dismissed by many as being merely film music, though without the film. A more established view today is that the work’s purely musical merits place it among the composer’s finest utterances. I am in agreement with this view.

The hour-long work is not an easy listen. Its four movements are played without a break, and much of the music is very static, though alternating with passages of extreme violence. It is a symphony, not a symphonic poem, but listeners who know the story behind it will get more out of it. The first movement is very slow, the textures bare, inviting us to imagine the intense cold of Saint Petersburg’s Palace Square, and the crowd that assembled peacefully there in January 1905 to petition the Tsar. We know of the appalling event that followed, however, so a fine performance will also evoke some foreboding. The symphony’s opening in this performance is, to my ears, rather matter of fact, and Noseda’s tendency to clip the long silences and held notes rather detracts from the atmosphere. He is far from the only conductor to do this however, but Wigglesworth (BIS, 2006 – review ~ review) counts those beats, and Storgårds (Chandos, 2019 – review) even finds room to prolong them slightly. Shostakovich makes use throughout the symphony of folk and revolutionary songs, the first of which is introduced here by three flutes. It is beautifully played, as also are a number of grim fanfares. The movement lasts for 16 minutes, whereas Eliahu Inbal, in a performance with the SWR Symphony Orchestra that has many fine features (SWR Classic, 2018), shaves a surprising 2½ minutes from Noseda’s timing, losing out on ambiance as a result. Storgårds, however, adds and minute and a half, courageous in such apparently inert music; but it is his reading that convinces this listener the most.

The petitioners, unarmed and non-violent, were brutally massacred by shooting and sabre charge by the Imperial Guard. There is no certainty as to how many died, but its seems likely to have been in the hundreds. This event, one of several that have become known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, is portrayed in the second movement. The revolutionary songs used in the first part of the movement are hymns in praise of and respectful of the Tsar, but after a brief reprise of the Palace Square music we have the massacre itself, played out with astonishing vividness. The passage begins like a fugue, which the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra deliver with the utmost virtuosity. Then comes a moment of grotesque realism, a rising fortissimo scale on the trombones where the players are required to slide between the semitone steps. However well you know the work this passage never loses its capacity to shock, though regretfully it works better in other performances than it does here, where neither the prominence of the trombones nor their monstrous glissandi quite makes the effect one needs. Wigglesworth, and especially Storgårds, are stunning here, and both conductors make more of a crescendo in the following, hammered repeated chords. The LSO recording doesn’t help, the textures less clearly defined than in either of the two studio recordings, and in truth the playing of both the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic for Wigglesworth and the BBC Philharmonic for Storgårds does not suffers not at all in comparison with their starrier rivals.

The third and fourth movements move away from specific events to address more general concerns. The third movement, variously entitled ‘In Memoriam’, ‘Eternal Memory’, and even ‘Requiem’, receives a deeply moving performance, with tempi perfectly judged and the LSO strings at their most silken and expressive. The fourth movement is a return to Shostakovich at his most turbulent, appropriate to a movement entitled ‘Tocsin’ – though Boosey & Hawkes does not use the word, preferring simply ‘Alarm’. As the work nears its close the Palace Square music returns, leading to a long and deeply affecting lament from the cor anglais. Any player will surely have this challenge at the back of the mind throughout the 50 or so minutes that precede it. Jérémy Sassano is magnificent at this key moment in the work. A bass clarinet then leads us into the stunning ultra-violent coda.

The tocsin bell sounds only at the end of the work, for some 60 bars, or less than a minute of music. The score asks simply for bells, no further precision, and only four notes are required. The score makes is clear that the final bell sound must be cut at the same instant as the rest of the orchestra, but some conductors have preferred to let it ring on and die away gradually. I think this is an error, but it does at least have the advantage that the individual who wants to get his ‘Bravo!’ in as soon as the final note has been played will probably be silenced. One such oaf rather mars the end of a superb performance, one in which the sheerly musical aspects of the work are emphasised: the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Kirill Karabits and recorded in November 2008, the resulting CD given away free with the BBC Music Magazine. Noseda’s performance is spectacularly well played, and it will have been a powerful experience in concert. But having spent a long time with it and with several other recorded performances I find it just a little lacking in power and atmosphere at both ends of the scale, reflective and violent. The bells are not particularly audible at the end, and this is a serious flaw. Noseda cuts them off at the like a knife, and as usual with LSO Live releases, there is no applause. (The boorish bravo-shouter was apparently present at a later performance at the Edinburgh Festival.)

The bells are well caught in the French performance conducted by Cluytens, and if they spill over it is only for an instant, perhaps because it was physically impossible to damp them. This is a white hot performance that cries out to be heard, a masterwork being discovered as we listen. The playing is a few notches below what we hear in later performances, and certainly what we would hear from the superb French National Radio Orchestra today. Inbal’s performance, with a particularly poignant cor anglais solo, is highly recommendable. It’s a shame we don’t hear the bells more at the end, particularly since, at a slower tempo, the closing bars generate overwhelming, monolithic force. Mark Wigglesworth’s performance is also very fine, with slightly more prominent bells. Of my chosen comparisons, this is the only performance that comes second to that by John Storgårds and the outstanding BBC Philharmonic. Those first-movement trombone glissandi  and the following passage appal the listener in a way I have not encountered in any other performance. The calmer passages of the work are just as successful, from the freezing stillness of the opening to the tenderness and regret of the third movement. All this is capped by a stupendous finale, in which church bells – on loan, apparently, from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra – are used to breath-taking effect. Yes, Storgårds, like Rostropovich before him in his performance on LSO Live (2002 – review) allows the bells to ring on. I regret this, but others won’t, and in any case, when it follows the astonishing final bars into which Storgårds and his magnificent players even manage to inject a crescendo, I for one can let it pass.

William Hedley

Other Review: John Quinn (October 2025)

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