Recorded my Building a Library script Tuesday last for broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Record Review (as CD Review has now been re-named), 9.30am this coming Saturday morning. Obviously I'm not going to give anything away about interpretations, but it's the first time I've found myself with a neat set of examples that didn't need editing down and down - in fact the total came to several minutes under the three-quarters-of-an-hour mark, but I felt I'd communicated what I wanted with all the right connections. The only drawback, as on previous occasions, was that several respectable middle-of-the-road versions didn't make the script.
How did I feel at the end of two months with this most curious of Ninth Symphonies, having suggested it in the first place? Surprisingly churned up, with the darkest portions of the work running round in my head. Never believe anything the public Shostakovich said about his works. He knew he was going to get stick for not producing a triumphal ode to the end of the war after the externalised tragedy of the Seventh and the much deeper soul-searchings of the Eighth. Even so, to describe the Ninth as being 'dominated by an airy, serene mood' is absurd.
Amazing how the fallacy has clung to so many of the liner notes for the 28 recordings I listened to. Doing a Building a Library on those alone would be fascinating in itself.I jotted down some of the plums, won't shame the writers by naming them in just a few examples: 'unquestionably the wittiest and most cheerful of all his symphonies'; 'tiny, undramatic and transparent'; 'the composer really is celebrating the end of the past years of war'; 'a pronouncedly classical piece full of enchanting cheerfulness and bright colours...innocuous traditional symphonic close'. Pictured below: the nearest portrait of Shostakovich I could find to the year of the Ninth: the composer at Bach celebrations in Leipzig, 1950.
If you tot up the passages of unequivocal cheerfulness, they total less than three minutes out of an average 23. And even that's doubtful: note the sarcastic trill in the opening, Mozart-Haydn theme. Outer movement developments are fierce, even violent; the transformation of the finale's neutral main theme into a goosestepping parade should be terrifying. I'm not proposing any Ian MacDonald-style 'Stalin subtexts' here - he goes too far in suggesting that the slow movement sheds 'crocodile tears of mourning'. The clarinet melody is a sad, limping waltz, no two ways about it, preferably taken at a moderato pace sufficient to show that, not as an Adagio, but there are persuasive examples at the much slower pace.
As for the bassoon solo, as tragic and lamentatory as its cor anglais equivalent in the Eighth Symphony? One proponent of 'happy symphony' concedes it could be 'a homage to the dead on a day of general rejoicing'. But, in the words of the dubious Shostakovich in Testimony, they are beating the symphony to rejoice. That's not my fancy, it's there in the dissonances and the chromatic twists added to initially straightforward material. Below: Monty with Marshals Zhukov and Rokossovsky and General Sokolovsky of the Red Army leaving the Brandenburg Gate in 1945.
One should never forget that Shostakovich's aim is to entertain as well as to chasten, to give the orchestra its rewards - and all the woodwind have their moments in the sun (though the oboe's is very brief). It's a wonderful, a perfect work, especially in dialogue with its vast(ly different) but similarly five-movement predecessor - in both the last three movements run without a break - and I hope something of that perfect originality comes through on Saturday. Any Building a Library worth its salt should be as much about the subject as the performances, taking you through the piece and pointing out its treasures, and a short symphony is in many ways the perfect candidate for that.
Top image: Shostakovich's greeting to Sibelius on his 80th birthday, inscribed with formal congratulations and a quotation of the finale's main theme. Snapped during my heavenly five hours at Ainola; discussed in context here
Posts
23 comments:
A nice and famous picture of the victorious generals in Berlin. Note the young unadorned officer clearly intrepreting between Monty and Zhukov.Note also that the Russians had been awarded British honours - they carried the boxes. Zhukov got the top one - see the red sash
Rokossovsky was nearly eliminated in Stalin'spurge in the 1930s. He was tortured ( nails pulled out) But just in time was brought back to command armies in the war.He was the general that did NOT move into Warsaw to support the Poles whan they rose against the Nazis.......but on Stalin's ordeers
A bit peripheral, but thanks for the additional information. Do I remember right that Zhukov's good luck did not last?
Zhukov was sidelined by Stalin after the war as becoming too popular. After Stalin's death he varied between occupying a powerful position and being out of favour. Such was politics in the USSR. I think that the latest scholarship gives Zhukov a high place as a military commander
I read that he suffered a heart attack in the late Stalin years and was labelled a 'Bonapartist'. But things got better after '53 and he lived on until '74.
Now, give me an inkling that you're interested enough in Shostakovich to tune in tomorrow...
Dear boy I always always try to listen to you when you are on the BBC on Saturday mornings
PS I would have thought that S should have composed a triumphal ode after victory in a terrible war which was thrust upon them
DCD
He began one (he said) but destroyed it and changed tack completely. There's something in the Glikman letters about 'now our lives will be so much more glorious', oozing irony. And then of course the trials of 'formalism' in music happened in '48 and it was downhill from then until Stalin's death...
Prokofiev wrote a bizarre Ode to the End of the War scored for 8 harps, 8 double basses, 4 harps and percussion. Ever the chess player trying to find unusual solutions... Shostakovich eventually capitulated with film music for The Fall of Berlin, with the Stalin lookalike of the day getting off a plane to cheering crowds on an airfield.
Believe you me I put that right on mt calendar, though I will be listening "after the fact." Do you remember our exchange about the 9th over my way? I certainly will never forget it! https://prufrocksdilemma.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/seeking-shostakovich-and-now-for-something-completely-different/
I'd forgotten that, Sue, but what a lot of ground you covered, and what reminders of curious things about it - goodness, Mravinsky played the last three movements again at the premiere. And Lenny got it so wrong (you remind me that I had two of his recordings and ended up not illustrating either of them). But one should never underestimate the pure entertainment value of popular symphonies, even those which are not as they seem. Still, I think that by the time you've finished with the programme you will not think of the work as jolly or just lightly ironic.
David, you are SO blooming articulate!! It's fab to listen to you and learn! I really enjoyed it, although I think I prefer the Leningrad one. Your voice is ever sounding more authoritative..
Thanks, dear NJ (I worked that one out). Objectively, I think I've shed some of my more strangulating sentences and the clarity of the symphony helped me to be a bit more focused than on some occasions.
I look forward to it. Meantime, I was just recalling how exhausted I was after my efforts at studying the 8th. In that context, the 9th came as a welcome relief, and I had no desire or energy for digging in deep. Which is just to say that one's perspective or mood at the moment of listening enters in a bit, too, and the 9th can allow for a lighter reading that's certainly not available for the 8th. This time, I'll come to the 9th fresh, and I am eager to hear the layers of understanding I know you will bring to it.
I still don't think there's any room for feeling lighter about the second or fourth movements - they're unequivocally bleak. But short, which perhaps makes all the difference. The compression in all this is amazing. And as with all Shostakovich symphonies, this one makes powerful comments or sheds different light on another, or others - it's certainly to be heard alongside the Eighth.
May I add my thanks for a most enjoyable programme, David? I used to listen to Building a Library a lot quite a few years back, when I was starting to get to know various works, and I always liked how, at its best, it shared enthusiasm, and made you listen, and offered a model for how to talk about music. Yours did that yesterday - and on point three, with DSCH, that's no mean feat. (Any thoughts on Julian Barnes' recent novel? I liked it a lot, but took Shostakovich as seen through a series of smokescreens as merely a starting point for a sympathetic Barnesian novel about an imaginary, if not entirely unrecognisable, figure.)
I've just revisited the Kondrashin 9th with the Moscow PO. I love the way Kondrashin had of conducting Shostakovich less as canonic repertoire than in the spirit of 'have you heard the news?'. And I'm grateful for your suggestion that it should be heard in the shadow of the 8th. It's the only thing which seems to make sense of its real oddities - so odd a piece that I suppose we still haven't quite got it.
And speaking of that, interesting thoughts from Susan on Bernstein's Shostakovich 9. I remember the video he made introducing the 6th and 9th from Vienna, not so long ago reissued on DVD, in which he maintained that the 9th is a 'fun' piece. I find that so odd, coming from him and all his Mahlerian affinity... Mind you, his Chicago 'Leningrad' apart, though even that somewhat tests the patience, I've never really taken to his Shostakovich.
Thanks, John; delighted to hear from you again. I haven't read the Barnes yet - thought I should before making the programme, but then realised that since it only dealt (so I'm told) with 1936, reckoned I could postpone it for a bit. Mixed reports so far.
What delights me is that people are hearing Shostakovich much more now for his formal perfection and innovations. And this really is perfect in the same way - only connect, since it was my last Building a Library - as Sibelius 4. As Sibelius said of that, not a note need be added or taken away. And as my friend Graham Rickson pointed out, it doesn't - in the best way - feel like its 23 minutes while you're listening.
Yes, very odd that Lenny should have - let's face it, since I now feel VERY strongly about the work - got it so wrong. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but have you seen the films of Mravinsky and Bernstein both conducting the finale of the Fifth in Leningrad, side by side, in the documentary 'Viola Sonata'?
Thanks, David, for the Viola Sonata film tipoff. It's welcome news to me, so I shall investigate. I've seen, separately, film of Mravinsky and Bernstein conducting the end of 5th, so I can imagine something of the contrast! Really one of the great mysteries of LB's conducting. I really can't believe - given that he was an anti-McCarthyite - that it was just Cold War stuff which made him not get Shostakovich subtext. Any ideas?
The Barnes, by the way, is a sort of triptych. The three sections are 1936, 1948 and a slightly unspecified point in his last years (this is a current Barnes novel: death would have to feature). I suspect this may not be entirely unmusical - nor the way it starts and ends with a literally legless peasant, who's surely the cousin of the fool in Boris Godunov. There's been a fair bit of carping about the novel, I know, and I'm not sure it really works, but there are good things in it.
Certainly LB seemed to get the subtext of the Fifth's finale - I think that's the difference implied in the two films, since Mravinsky plays it straight (though of course he too would not have been unaware of what was intended in those flattened notes). Maybe he wanted to sell the Ninth as a lively piece in his Children's Concerts and certainly it can work that way (some of the time). But after the first minute or so it parts company totally from an unambiguously cheerful model, Prokofiev's 'Classical' Symphony.
Your recommendation is enough; I shall get me a copy of Barnes's book. I enjoyed Flaubert's Parrot way back, but haven't investigated more recent stuff.
David: I've now listened to your BRILLIANT record review of Shostakovich's 9th twice through, the second time taking notes. What a marvelous education your commentary offers in how to listen and what to listen for. Among other things, it's an object lesson in how judgments about tempo can completely make or break the impact of a work in performance.
I absolutely agree with John Gardiner's point about the Building a Library program: "I always liked how, at its best, it shared enthusiasm, and made you listen, and offered a model for how to talk about music. Yours did that yesterday." It's fascinating to come back to this symphony fresh and receive such a powerful demonstration of how performance interpretations completely change the character of a work. From the start, you showed this again and again, beginning with a stunning demonstration of how Gergiev's slower tempo in his first recording completely sucked the life out of the opening theme. Fascinating, too, that 11 of the booklets uncritically embrace Shostakovich's "light and airy" comment (even I didn't do that in my first go-round with this symphony). I'm curious now to go back to Bernstein's interpretation to see how I hear it it today. It's hard to imagine that, even in his hands, it makes good on his claim that it's "all humorous, every minute and every movement. It is all one big series of jokes." You are absolutely right, it’s not even remotely possible to hear it that way, and certainly not in the hands of the right interpreter. Your review vividly underscores Glikman’s comment that the work demanded “a refinement and detailed understanding of its nuances.” Bravo, David, and thank you so much!
David: Looks like I can get the Rozhdestvensky on CD, though, if you wouldn't mind, I want to make sure this is the same one as in your Record Review: http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=785554. I'm listening to it now on Spotify, and it's tear your head off fabulous. Also have the Barshai on my wish list. No time, I decided, to listen to the Bernstein, whom I generally find too broad, anyway, when I can spend time listening to these!
Thanks so much, Sue: QED, didn't you think, in the examples, especially of the second and fourth movements. And no-one goes deeper than Rozhdestvensky (I haven't checked that link, but if it's USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra and it sounds all echo-y, that's the one. Used to be on the Olympia label, possibly on Melodiya now).
I always find it fascinating how it often isn't a question of faster or slower, but of what goes into the music-making at teh chosen speed - Rozh gets such intensity from his wind soloists at a very slow pace which I'm sure Shostakovich would have 'bought'. But in the cases of Gergiev I and Kurtz, slow is deadly.
David: Yes, absolutely. Glad you noted here, again, about tempos as only part of what must go into the music-making. Your example of the wind soloists by Rozh and crew was particularly mind-blowing.
I love reading Testimony and read it 3 times, entertaining book. But you seem to suggest it might be somewhat fictional. I wonder if there are more accurate books on Shostakovich. All his life he had to be so careful not to disturb the beast, one becomes super cautious with time.
Testimony is true in essence, but there's still much wrangling about how Volkov assembled his text(s). Anyway, it reads beautifully with its dark irony, like Gogol.
The Building a Library is there in the programme on iPlayer for another couple of weeks, and in perpetuity as a podcast, if you're interested.
Post a Comment