Some works emerge after an explosion of creative intensity in a matter of weeks; others sit and brood for some time before seeing the light of day. In part, Britten’s violin concerto was a reaction to the Spanish Civil War and individual suffering there, receiving its first performance in the United States, to which Britten was temporarily exiled, in 1940. Britten recalled “the figure of the lonely, miserable soldier trapped in the great machine of war”, a deep-seated feeling of empathy that can be traced through a good number of his later works. This concerto was revised three times: in 1950, 1954 and 1965.
Nobody quite knows much about the genesis of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. He may well have conceived it in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, and the Soviet pianist Tatyana Nikolayeva spoke of him playing the opening of the first movement to her in 1951. With the composer often dicing with death while Stalin was still alive, the symphony had to wait until after the dictator’s demise in 1953 before it could be premiered. Both works, the concerto and the symphony, are studies in nigrescence.
Britten’s concerto for the violin is no romp through a field of gently waving sunflowers. It is hard-edged with leaping, angular contours emerging from a sea of surrounding darkness. Even the orchestral accompaniment has a chill to it: the marching tread from the timpani at the start punctuated by suspended cymbal strokes, followed by agonised sighs from the strings. These sighs reappear at the start of the final movement Passacaglia, after which downward scales suggest a descent into the abyss. In choosing this musical form with its origins in 17th century Spain it is highly probable that Britten was influenced by its use in Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District: he had proofread the score for his publisher in 1935 and gave the opera an enthusiastic review the following year.
As with so many other fiddle concertos outside the mainstream, everything depends on a successful projection by the soloist. Janine Jansen, who seems to self-identify with all the charcoal and ebony elements in the score, gave a supremely authoritative account, magnificently partnered by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Antonio Pappano. What was especially remarkable was the way in which she married a sweet-toned fullness of sound from her 1715 Shumsky-Rode Stradivarius with wild passionate fury. The highly charged intensity of her double-stopping in the cadenza which precedes the final movement was quite astonishing. In that Passacaglia she painted all the colours of pain from sharpest crimson to deepest violet, her instrument moving seamlessly from whispered articulation to a full-throated roar. As she herself has commented in an analysis of the work, “It feels like it’s on the borders of what’s possible for the instrument, and there’s almost a sense of finding new ways of writing for the violin.” In her Bach encore she sustained all the plaintive eloquence that inhabits the closing moments of the concerto.
There was little respite from the Stygian gloom in the second half. Shostakovich sets the prevailing mood in the long opening movement of his Tenth Symphony, where pent-up feelings are gradually released from subterranean layers. Pappano kept things moving without ever probing too deeply below the surface. For all the saturated tone and weightiness of the LSO’s superb string section, with the dark-hued and henbane-drenched violas being noteworthy, one thing bothered me. It was all rather plush and plummy at times, unquestionably impressive, but lacking in acerbity. I missed the rawness of an open wound being gradually exposed; Pappano’s bandages somewhat disguised the suppuration beneath. You noticed this in the richness of the clarinet solos, the balletic qualities of the phrasing, the slightly genteel sound of the flute, and piccolos at the end that charmed rather than piercing the ear.
There are some grounds for thinking that Shostakovich saw the shadow of Tchaikovsky lurking in the background. In the latter’s Pathétique a waltz and then a march are used for the interior movements; Shostakovich uses the same organising forms, but in reverse order, for his second and third movements. The second is four minutes of pure venom, like listening to a huge bronchially infected crowd expectorating with the full force of their lungs. It is supposedly a portrait of Stalin, one of the most savage and unflattering representations of a political leader anywhere. Here, the unanimity of bow strokes in the sledgehammer string chords coupled with the fusillades from the brass were mightily impressive.
Pappano turned the third movement into a louche-sounding waltz. It has a personal reference expressed in a motto theme derived from the German transliteration of his name: D-S-C-H (corresponding to D, E flat, C and B). Shostakovich was one of the great musical squirrels, burying many a nut deep within his musical scores. Another personal motive, played repeatedly by the solo horn, comes from the notes E-A-E-D-A (a cryptic mixture of French and German note-spellings: E-La-Mi-Ré-A). This refers to Elmira Nazirova, a pianist from Baku with whom the composer had a relationship. In Shostakovich’s world nothing is quite as it seems to be, and interpreters do well to uncover as much of the irony as they can tap into. The bassoons, for instance, could have sounded more sardonic, and Pappano was curiously reticent in making the percussion, particularly the tam-tam, tell persuasively, though the leader’s solo towards the end had some fine grimly mocking touches.
One of the things I appreciated about Pappano’s reading were the minimal pauses between individual movements. This strengthened the idea of a vast musical canvas being laid out (and at 54 minutes overall this was indicative of an expansive approach), the prevailing sombre mood colouring even the slow section that opens the Finale. In the Allegro that followed, Pappano indulged the fairground qualities with an unfurling of rumbustiousness, a sense perhaps that after the vanquishing of a tyrant within the confines of music it was time for a celebration. Yet even at the very end there is something of an equivocation between triumph and defeat, the composer’s musical monogram defiant on the timpani for the closing bars.
Is Shostakovich’s Tenth his greatest symphony, as some argue? Even that, like nearly everything he wrote, is far from being clear-cut. Much has been made of the connections between him and Mahler: their music is very personal and autobiographical. But whereas the signposts in Mahler are obvious, the signage in Shostakovich is often buried or at best seems to be pointing in two different directions at once. In that sense, his music accords with Churchill’s observation made in 1939 that Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Shostakovich will always keep us guessing.
