Open Writing

Dmitri SHOSTAKOVICH (1906 – 1975)

Symphony No. 14 op. 135 (1969)

The last two symphonies are the ones with which I’m least familiar, and the Fourteenth, sad to relate, wins the less than prestigious Sore Thumb Award in this respect. Happily, doing this review has provided me with a belated opportunity to put that somewhere in the region of right.

It’s well enough known that Shostakovich had developed a close association with Benjamin Britten in the years following their first meeting. Quite how they wangled it I’m not sure, as even with his greater freedom (both of expression and for travel abroad) Shostakovich was far from off the leash. Another English composer who enjoyed a cordial, if less obviously productive, relationship with Shostakovich during this period was Malcolm Arnold, who relates how they were never allowed to meet in private – in Arnold’s case, the Party-patsy Kabalevsky was the omnipresent gooseberry. Lots of Shostakovich rubbed off onto Britten, but rather less Britten rubbed off onto Shostakovich. My immediate impression of the Fourteenth Symphony is that it is not so much influenced by Britten as a deliberate adoption of elements of Britten’s style, and thus part and parcel of the tribute to a friend implicit (or even explicit, for that matter) in the work’s dedication. “Immediate” is the word! I don’t think anybody’s going to miss, in the very opening violin line, the allusion to Peter Grimes – it breathes the very same bleak, chill air that drifts in from the grey North Sea in the first Interlude.

Much the same holds in relation to the “influence” of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, which Shostakovich had orchestrated not long before writing the symphony. Then again, there is a supposed parallel with another “symphony of songs”, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. With all due respect to David Doughty, whose notes are otherwise exemplary, his suggestion that “it is indeed the close relationship of the texts which give a symphonic structure of a kind to what is otherwise a song cycle in the manner of [the Mahler]” strikes me as an uncharacteristic splodge of bovine excrement. I’m not suggesting here that Shostakovich’s work is anything but symphonic – that much is plain enough from Shostakovich’s motivic writing and the reprise of the opening bars, higher, thinner and bleaker, in the penultimate song – but by golly I disagree most strongly with the implication that Mahler’s work is not symphonic – the whole point about Mahler’s crowning masterpiece is that he finally achieved what has to be the ultimate goal of a composer of only songs and symphonies, namely the reconciliation through fusion of those two, diametrically opposed forms.

Where Shostakovich’s and Mahler’s paths coincide is that they were both suffering from undeniable intimations of mortality. Shostakovich, who had never enjoyed the rudest of health, was (if you take my meaning) becoming alarmingly polite, which conspired with his recent preoccupation to put the fear of death into him. The good thing about this is that, a number of years down the line from the cathartic Thirteenth, Shostakovich felt sufficiently free to express in his music such “negative” sentiments without worrying unduly about getting a rollocking for “formalist tendencies” or some such. The downside, if it can be called such, is that for once Shostakovich was writing a symphony devoid of any subversive undertones, coded messages and the like. If you’ve got used to treating Shostakovich symphonies as the musical equivalent of the Times crossword, the Fourteenth might seem a bit “penny plain” – only “might”, mind!

Doughty, along with plenty of others (including myself!), suggests that this is “perhaps the grimmest of all his works”. Fair enough, but let’s not forget that the subject of death is one of endless fascination for practically anyone suckered with the label “mortal”, and right down through the ages the practitioners of all the Arts have turned this fascination into some of the greatest, and often ultimately most uplifting, works. While we’re at it, let’s not forget either that not one of the poems Shostakovich chose was about “death” plain and simple: he was less concerned about those who “fell”, and more about those who were “shoved”. There was clearly life in the old dog yet.

Rudolf Barshai was entrusted with the first performance. I’ve observed that plenty of folk tend to speak in tones of hushed reverence about recordings made by persons so-privileged. Why? The bloke who first performed a work isn’t necessarily the best man for the job, even if he happened to be that at the time. Composers select “premiere performers” for all sorts of reasons – and being the best-qualified for the task is rarely the top of the list. In Barshai’s case, though, it is true that friendship and mutual respect had a lot to do with it. But we still shouldn’t let that colour our judgement, should we?

Shostakovich chose eleven poems, in movement order two by the Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca, six by Guillaume Appolinaire, one by Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, and two by Maria Rainer Rilke. That’s a total of precisely none written in Shostakovich’s mother-tongue, so all of them were originally set in translation. Doughty points out that Shostakovich later sanctioned performances using the original languages, as well as a version in German translation – though surprisingly not one in English, the language of the symphony’s dedicatee, Britten! Clearly, the inflections and speech rhythms of the texts, the music inherent in the sounds of the poetry, were not very high on Shostakovich’s list of priorities, and we the listeners must seek the correspondence between text and music from the “flow of meaning”, assuming of course that any particular translation from the Russian translations with which Shostakovich worked has been done so as to preserve the order as set. Ye gods, that’s convoluted! Thankfully, this recording sticks to the “original” Russian, which is probably the form in which the composer himself first apprehended the poems!

A symphony this may be by name, but a song cycle it most definitely is by nature: each of the songs is sharply characterised and distinguished from its neighbours, even where Shostakovich engineers a seamless link from one to the next. The poems are frequently like “playlets” so, compared with the relatively detached, discursive approach of the Thirteenth, here the singers have to act their socks off! It follows, as day does night, that suitable singers are going to make a performance, whilst duffers will destroy it. With Alla Simoni and Vladimir Vaneev, Barshai seems to have come up trumps.

Like Aleksashkin, Vaneev is a real Russian bass, another of those voices that’s ample, black as a coal cellar at midnight, and ideally suited to the sort of grave (!) recitative that Shostakovich requires in the first song (appositely entitled De Profundis), or the venomous expressions of disgust in the eighth (The Zaporozhian Cossack’s Answer to the Sultan of Constantinople), where he revels in the colouful language. This is definitely one to keep away from the kiddies, unless you want to explain the meaning of sentences like “You were born while your mother was writhing in faecal spasms”! Even when he’s singing high up, the shadow of those deep undertones still resonates within the sound, as in the third song (Lorelei) where he also demonstrates articulative agility comparable to the soprano’s, or in the ninth (O Delvig!) where he veers from tenderness to tentative optimism to heartrending effect.

I generally quake with apprehension when sopranos, whose voices seem to be trained to crack glasses at twenty paces, point their lethal vocal chords in my direction. With blessed relief I can tell you that Simoni is a god-send. She has a strong voice, but (to my ears) a delivery that is firm and relatively uniform across her entire range: there is little if anything of the dreaded wobble or yowling “up top”, and (best of all) she wilfully ignores the “Soprano Axiom” (“Output level shall be proportional to frequency squared, or cubed if you can manage it”). But there’s more than mere firmness and strength of tone – for example in the fourth movement (The Suicide), there’s touching delicacy as well. To cap it all she is an incredible vocal actress – particularly evident in the sixth song (Madam, look!) where her hysterical hacking of the word “laughing” becomes a comical cross between stammering and gipping! – if anything more than a match for even the impressive Vaneev.

So, the voices are terrific, but what of their “backing group”? I have memories (however distant and vague!) of playing cleaner than this. I equally have memories (equally distant, but rather more distinct!) of it utterly boring the pants off me. I’d like to think that it’s because I’m older, wiser, and more perceptive. I’d like to, but with a sigh I must set vanity aside and instead admit that it’s because the WDRSO strings play with a fire and pungency that simply pins me to the wall, and with such sweetness that I melt and dribble down onto the floor. I could rabbit on for ages (come to think of it, I have anyway!) about all the zillions of felicities that litter the course of this symphony, but I’ll have to limit myself to an exemplificatory “Oh, god! You should hear those double-basses!” Shostakovich, in coincidental observation of UK trades descriptions legislation, says “strings and percussion”, making sparing but correspondingly effective use of the can-banging boys. If the most significant contribution comes in the form of the temporal ticking of clacking castanets, they do get one “big scene”, when they’re let off the leash in the militaristic fifth song (On Watch). By gum, do they enjoy the outing!

Standing at the centre of it all is Rudolf Barshai, guiding the threads of the music with effortless-sounding fluidity – nothing fast seems reckless or rushed, yet even the snailest of snail’s paces is palpably mobile. The voices are placed well to the fore, but Barshai makes pretty sure that not a single note of the instrumental contribution is lost. The many facets of Death drawn together by the composer’s collection of texts are characteristically by no means all unremitting gloom; we get doses of rage and outrage, stoic acceptance and aching nostalgia, even comic turns and a ray or two of hope. That’s a lot of ground, and Barshai covers it all. The recording, both immediate and ambient, is absolutely superb.

I don’t want to end this on a negative note, so I’ll say this first: why on earth are there no texts and translations? Shostakovich was responding in a profound manner to the poetry – to hear the “flow of music” without knowing the corresponding “flow of meaning” is like going to the cinema and sitting with your eyes shut, i.e. utterly ridiculous. Anyway, quite honestly, I don’t care if this music can be played – or sung, for that matter – better than it is here. These musicians have inflamed my mind and touched my heart, and believe me that’s not as easy to do now as it once was!