First-Rate Account of “Controversial” Music

from this week’s SFS event page

The program for this week’s subscription concert by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), given its first performance last night in Davies Symphony Hall, was afforded the luxury of an overall title: Banned and Boycotted: Music of Bartók and Shostakovich. These composers were distinguished by having written music that had run afoul of powerful authorities, political and clerical. Ironically, the symphony selection on the program was by Alexander Borodin; and it served as an “innocuous spacer” between the controversial offerings by the composers named in the program title.

To be fair, however, the opening selection, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 77 violin concerto in A minor was not intended to provoke controversy, nor, for that matter, was it given a chance to do so. Rather, it suffered a fate common to those bearing the brunt of Soviet authorities, that of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The time was 1946 the year in which the cultural doctrine developed by Central Committee secretary Andre Zhdanov was issued.

The conclusion of World War II had came as a great relief to all Russians. After having written a trilogy of symphonies reflecting the tribulations of wartime, with particular attention to the Siege of Leningrad, Shostakovich could finally write an upbeat symphony celebrating the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. This was his Opus 70 (ninth) symphony in E-flat major, first performed on November 3, 1945. Having been redeemed after denunciation and then sustained all the hardships of wartime, Shostakovich faced a prospect of recovering his status as a respected composer.

The Zhdanov Doctrine put an end to that. Some of the country’s finest artists from all disciplines suffered denunciation (if not worse), primarily for honoring influences that were not “purely Soviet.” Shostakovich was far from the only composer to be brought down by the Doctrine. Other familiar names from that period were Sergei Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian. Shostakovich was working on the Opus 77 when he was felled by this second denunciation, and the score found its way to his notorious desk drawer. The music would not be performed until October of 1955, two years after the death of Joseph Stalin.

To be fair, Opus 77 is rife with the influences of Western music condemned by the Zhdanov Doctrine as perniciously decadent. The Wikipedia author for the concerto’s Web page describes the opening “Nocturne” movement as a “semi-homage” to Edward Elgar’s Opus 85 cello concerto in E minor; but I could not avoid thinking about ways in which some of Béla Bartók’s slow movements have often been described as “night music.” Similarly, while the Wikipedia author identifies the “fate motif” from Ludwig van Beethoven’s fifth (Opus 67 in C minor) symphony in the “Passacaglia” movement, my own thoughts turned to the grim passacaglia from Benjamin Britten’s Opus 33 opera Peter Grimes. (Britten and Shostakovich would not meet until 1960, after which they became close friends.)

Whether or not the music itself reverberated with political controversy, last night’s performance, conducted by Jakub Hrůša with violin soloist Karen Gomyo, was all about presenting the music with all of its rich technical details and intense expressiveness. Gomyo, who first performed with SFS in 2007, was thoroughly fearless in taking on the full spectrum of Shostakovich’s technical demands, always delivering her results with just the right rhetorical twists. Furthermore, her sense of rhetoric was perfectly matched by Hrůša, who consistently supported her every gesture with Shostakovich’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink demands for instrumentation.

Indeed, instrumentation was one of the most fascinating aspects of the composition. In that opening “Nocturne,” almost all of the orchestral resources are confined to the lower register. The solo violin rises up to higher pitches, but the instrument is almost never joined by any of the ensemble voices. Hrůša knew exactly how to balance the full scope of those resources, allowing all of those low-register murmurings to come through with bone-chilling clarity.

The same could be said for his approach to the suite that Bartók extracted from his Opus 19, the one-act pantomime entitled “The Miraculous Mandarin.” Based on a sordid libretto about low-life brutes and a predatory seductress, this was the music whose world premiere in Cologne so offended the clergy that all plans for subsequent performances were suspended. Mind you, the music was so rife with raucous dissonances that many “proper” members of the audience probably found the score as vulgar as the scenario.

Fortunately, we now live in an age in which it is perfectly acceptable to have fun with such dissonances. That seems to be the way in which Hrůša chose to conduct Bartók’s suite. This is not to say that he tried to whitewash connotations of the more lurid aspects of the scenario; but this was an interpretation of the score that thrived on sly smiles, frequently punctuated a generous number of barbaric yawps. If either Bartók or Hrůša offended any spirits, those offended parties would do better to learn how to enjoy a good ribald joke.

Between these two stormy offerings there was one particularly distinctive moment of calm. Gomyo chose Astor Piazzolla for her encore selection. Unless I am mistaken this was taken from a collection of six Tango Etudes composed for either flute or violin solo. My guess is that she performed the “Lento Meditativo” étude from this collection; but this is, at best, an educated guess. More important was the the quietude of the selection offered just the right amount of restorative calm after the frenetic Burlesque movement wrapped up the Shostakovich concerto.

The other “spacer” between Shostakovich and Bartók was Borodin’s second symphony in B minor. Borodin is still known for several admirable achievements during the nineteenth century, but this symphony is not one of them. Over the course of four movements, there is a decided paucity of thematic ideas with almost no effort to unfold any of those ideas through developmental techniques. Taken on its own terms, however, the music positively roars in asserting its themes; and Hrůša was totally unabashed when it came to unleashing all of those roars. It was as if the conductor felt that listeners needed a cold plunge in tonality at its most elementary before undertaking the roller coaster ride of Bartók’s dissonances.