Shostakovich: Symphony No. 15 in A Main, Op. 141 (Dwell) (BR-Klassik)
★★★★★
Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his final symphony with left hand alone. A coronary heart assault in 1966, adopted by a number of falls and fractures, left him closely disabled. His resolution was to coach one hand to do the work of two, and to economise on bodily effort. This will clarify the expanses of clean staves in some pages of his fifteenth symphony, as if he lacked power to fill in instrumental element.
Maxim Shostakovich, who performed the 1972 premiere, known as the work his father’s ‘birth-to-death autobiography’. That, too, is just a partial view. The symphony opens with a vacation funfair and a blast of Rossini’s William Inform. Shostakovich is blowing a impolite noise at his scenario, maybe at life itself. 1 / 4-hour Adagio brings no comfort. A 3rd motion, simply 4 minutes of it, solely exacerbates the discomfort earlier than a finale made up of alternating Adagios and Allegrettos steers us to some form of acceptance of the sporadic video games that destiny performs with our existence.
The fifteenth is an enigma that few conductors crack. The one recording that has satisfied me till now was led by Kurt Sanderling, a detailed affiliate of Shostakovich who knew his interior language and caustic wit. Sanderling by no means, to my information, provided a literal clue to the work.
The current recording is performed by Bernard Haitink, who delayed partaking with Shostakovich till late in life, and carried out it right here with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2015.
Ignoring the apparent difficulties within the rating, Haitink lets the music unfold, web page by web page, as a giant unanswered query. That is an act of storytelling during which the deliberate lack of decision on the symphony’s finish seems to be the one doable conclusion.
Shostakovich is saying: we’ll by no means know the which means of life, simply get on with it.
The humility in that recognition is aesthetically and spiritually reassuring. In per week that introduced information of the dying of Sofia Gubaidulina, a composer who shared Shostakovich’s Soviet struggling, this penetrating efficiency makes some sense of our morta; fragility.
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Norman Lebrecht is among the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s an everyday presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Road Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning towards human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.