Very Strange Symphony

Sorry, folks, I seem to have gone M.I.A. for a while, due to theatre festivals and related meetings.  Anyway, I'm back, with a note about a very unusual symphony -- indeed, it's downright odd.

I got reminded of this one yesterday when I went to the National Ballet of Canada's production of John Neumeier's ballet The Seagull, derived from the play by Chekhov.  A large part of the music for this ballet is drawn from the final Fifteenth Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich.

When this music was first heard in 1971 it raised a lot of eyebrows, and if anything the puzzlement has deepened since then.  For those who always want to know exactly "why" a creative artist produces a particular work at a particular time, this symphony presents very fertile ground for theorizing, yet offers no more concrete answers now than it did 41 years ago after the premiere.

For one thing, the more raucous, overt side of the composer is largely (not entirely) absent from long stretches of the score.  While there are a few loud climaxes, much of the music is very quiet indeed. 

The instrumentation is really odd too.  There's a large dependence on the bass instruments, and there's also a very big percussion section which plays a crucial role. 

Finally, there are the quotations.  The first movement moves along at a rapid, yet still amiable tempo, only to be held up several times by a short quotation from Rossini's William Tell overture.  The finale likewise opens with a deep lugubrious brass figure quoted from Wagner's Die Walküre.  Why those particular quotations from those particular works?  Shostakovich never told.

I first heard this symphony in the world premiere recording on EMI which was conducted by the composer's son, Maksim -- and I was hooked by it right from the first hearing.  But the recording to get, if you can come by it, is Bernard Haitink's Decca version.  Far more than the premiere version, Haitink makes a convincing case for the work as a true symphony, not just some bizarre musical pastiche.  His account of that strange finale rises to a truly terror-stricken climax and this passage, with the massive gong stroke that ends it, is faithfully captured by the recording engineers.  From that point, the music gradually unwinds into the long diminuendo cadenza for the percussion group, whose gentle clicking and chiming sounds carry the symphony down to its quiet, mysterious end. 

On the latest CD reissue, the symphony comes with a considerable bonus: the song cycle (with orchestra) From Jewish Folk Poetry.  It's one of a series of works with powerful Jewish overtones that formed Shostakovich's response to the horrors of the Holocaust, and is well worth hearing.  The songs make use of harmonies and rhythms drawn from the musical idiom of Jewish music, perfectly supporting the texts.  The CD combination of symphony and song cycle is a must hear!