BaL 29.06.13 - Shostakovich Symphony. No. 5

[Nick Armstrong]

Respect, Sir!

Agreed!

o Ferney...!

[Petrushka]

Agreed!

o Ferney...!

Agreed here too. It's posts like this that make the Forum so worthwhile.

[richardfinegold]

This was pretty much my experience as well in 1975 (and also with the 7th at about the same time). All the commentary I could then find was completely at odds with the way I experienced DSCH's music. The publication of Testimony in 1979 was a watershed moment and the critical pendulum swung the other way. Listening to Shostakovich symphonies live in those days was an especially exciting experience. I heard it in Moscow in December 1979 (LSO, Colin Davis) and again at one of Maxim Shostakovich's first concerts after his defection. Even more exciting was Haitink and the Concertgebouw in 1981 and by this time everybody was hearing the 5th with post-Testimony ears.

My experience is similar. I learned the piece from the Ancerl recording as a starving University Student. I remember the reaction of my roommate to the finale, when he said "Wow, is that the piece that Shostakovich had to write to prove that he was Russian, so that he wouldn't be sent to the Gulag?" That would have been in 1978. For both of us the ending didn't ring true, and seemed to be about something other than "the Soviet Artists reply to just criticism".

[richardfinegold]

Similar thematic contour (Mahler's First Group = F ] G - A - ] C - - F ] Bb C D CBb ] F; Shostakovich's = A ] D - E - ] F - - EF] G Bb F etc)
Similar-ish traversal of a Sonata Form, beginning in the minor, ending in the Major.

BUT (and I think this, rather than Testimony suggests the "enforced happy ending" feeling that many people experience)

Mahler's is a gloriously unsullied D major ending. Shostakovich reaches D major, but the major Third (F#) is sounded only by the first Trumpet and Trombone (everyone else has a bare Fifth, D - A) and positive effect of this is depressed by their climaxing on a G minor triad whilst everyone else is still whomping out the Tonis & Fifth, creating a grinding dissonance with D at the bottom and Bb at the top. We've heard this before at the climax of the development of the First movement (fig 30, bar 208), which the composer himslef referred to as the "crisis point" of the Movement. Remembering it at the end of the work sours the idea of a "Triumphant Finale" - and this sense that not all is well is hammered home by the Bass Drum; instructed to play fff whilst everyone else is kept ff - an uncouth, brutal thumping.

It can be played as if the dissonances have been overcome; a final surge of doubt before the success of the D major triad in the last bars - but this can only be achieved if the Bass Drum is underplayed. Bernstein does this in his first recording - which the composer greatly admired.

Excellent, ferney!

[LeMartinPecheur]

Kurt Sanderling, who attended the 1937 premiere, said:
"The vast majority of the audience knew perfectly well what it was all about.[ ...]The closing section of the symphony[....]was wrongly interpreted in some quarters as describing the jubilation of a party congress. But as the observant listener will notice, the enforced enthusiasm of the masses is meant as a gesture of defiance and self-affirmation - not as a victory for the regime, but as a triumph against it."

It's a shame Sanderling's BSO recordings so often get overlooked - his 5th is one of the greatest, utterly true to spirit and structure, apparently not "sensational" enough to attract reviewers' attention much. Beautifully recorded in the ChristusKirche too (1984, Berlin Classics).

jlw: when did Sanderling say this? And do you know when it reached this country?

I've just Googled Sanderling and Shoster's 5th, which has brought up his BSO account, or one of them (the CD release date is given as 1994 but of course that may well not be the recording date). The Amazon US reviews say the orchestra, esp the brass, is very poor but even so the interpretation repays attention. Any comments please?

[Barbirollians]

NYPO/Bernstein and the RCA Previn version for me .

[jayne lee wilson]

LMP - Kurt Sanderling's comment about the 1937 premiere is in the interview with Sanderling that accompanies the DSCH 5 Berlin Symphony recording, on Berlin Classics BC 2063-2. Other reissues may not include it. Recorded in 1/1982, its first Edel release, presumably East Germany only, was 1984. First CD release here was 1992, and the interview was conducted in Berlin then.
Ignore those Amazon US reviews. Amazon reviews are generally pretty unreliable anyway (you have no idea of the experience, or the audio equipment, of the writer). But if they found the brass "poor" they have very strange ears, or equipment, indeed! I can only imagine they wished for more prominent, more snarling, brass... The Berlin Symphony is a lovely, characterful orchestra, with outstandingly full, rich strings and wind soloists who project their music vividly.

Remember too the allusions to the Pushkin Song "Rebirth" in the finale of the 5th giving a sure guide to the composer's true, dark and hidden, feelings - the link won't work here, but you'll find it in the excellent Wiki article about the 5th, and lots more of interest besides.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphon...(Shostakovich)

I've always been surprised that anyone could hear the 5th as an unadulterated triumph. Whilst excited at its power and orchestral brilliance, I think I was both puzzled and disturbed by it on first aquaintance. The end sounds exactly as DSCH described it in Testimony - "as if someone were beating you with a stick, saying - "your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing" - and your rise shakily and march off muttering "our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing". Sanderling knew all this from the time of the premiere so his reading is, necessarily perhaps, more sober than most. You'll find David Gutman's review of it in the Gramophone archive (or the old mags in the attic) in the 7/1994 issue. (His comment about the horns, by the way, relates to the typical East German vibrato).

Maybe its going too far to say the truth was always there to be found (well, HEARD, at least - as fhg's masterly analysis shows); but pre-and-post Testimony, many European listeners and reviewers seemed to listen with commonplace political prejudices rather than open minds and hearts.

The best account or analysis of the piece that I know of, in its proper historical, political and personal context, is the chapter "Terror 1935-38" in "The New Shostakovitch", by Ian MacDonald.

[BBMmk2]

This, I have to say my favourite Shosta Symphony, maybe hids whole oeuvre?

[silvestrione]

This, I have to say my favourite Shosta Symphony, maybe hids whole oeuvre?

I just prefer the 10th, and the 14th is a masterpiece from first note to last, totally enthralling, but harrowing too!

[silvestrione]

Yes, that fff bass drum...I first felt its impact in a BBC broadcast of a Rostropovich performance with his Washington forces...a draining performance, and at the end you felt someone was being beaten to death.

[BBMmk2]

Yes the 10th but the 14th? Makes me to sombre for words. So I dont listen to it very often.

[verismissimo]

Are we prepared to engage here with the issue of this work's "real meaning"?

I'm sure this is a perfectly valid question. But for me the acid test is, as with all works with programmatic content: does it work as music, irrespective of meaning?

And, of course, it does!

[LeMartinPecheur]

jlw: thanks for your #37. I do hope Sanderling figures in the programme so that I can hear a sample.

I have the Ian MacDonald book. Or books: you probably know he subjected the first edition to a pretty massive rewrite (unfortunately dying before he finished), thus getting rid of some of his dodgier ideas such as a comprehensive coding of 'the party' versus 'the people' as two-note cells v three-note. I'm no musician but even I couldn't buy that one! But his masterly presentation of the political background and the ever-present cold hand of terror on ordinary Russians-in-the-street is essential reading.

I don't usually bother with 'Life & Times'-style books about composers, but I make a very big exception in DSCH's case. Do you know Shostakovich Reconsidered by Ho and Feofanov? A comprehensive demolition of the Fay/Taruskin attacks on the authenticity of Testimony, with plenty of incidental material on the political/ sociological background to his life..

[LeMartinPecheur]

I'm sure this is a perfectly valid question. But for me the acid test is, as with all works with programmatic content: does it work as music, irrespective of meaning?

And, of course, it does!

verismissimo: I agree with your general point but would suggest - very tentatively - that the issue with this work is different and more fundamental. If we accept the Testimony-style subtext, that could give a priori grounds for eliminating certain styles of performance: e.g. a cheery, unambiguously triumphant finale. The reviewer might simply say, "OK, it works purely as music, but it's just plain wrong!"

But then again he might not

[DavidP]

jlw: thanks for your #37. I do hope Sanderling figures in the programme so that I can hear a sample.

I have the Ian MacDonald book. Or books: you probably know he subjected the first edition to a pretty massive rewrite (unfortunately dying before he finished), thus getting rid of some of his dodgier ideas such as a comprehensive coding of 'the party' versus 'the people' as two-note cells v three-note. I'm no musician but even I couldn't buy that one! But his masterly presentation of the political background and the ever-present cold hand of terror on ordinary Russians-in-the-street is essential reading.

I don't usually bother with 'Life & Times'-style books about composers, but I make a very big exception in DSCH's case. Do you know Shostakovich Reconsidered by Ho and Feofanov? A comprehensive demolition of the Fay/Taruskin attacks on the authenticity of Testimony, with plenty of incidental material on the political/ sociological background to his life..

LeMartinPecheur you do Ian MacDonald a disservice - re-writes or no the whole book is dodgy (But then he was a musical amateur, a writer on pop music without an ability to read Russian so what do you expect?) Wherever it comes to discussing the music itself he doesn't seem to realise that the music has a structure and a form, he simply ascribes political meanings to musical "events" out of context. I'm with Shostakovich when he said, “When a critic writes that in such-and-such a symphony Soviet civil servants are represented by the oboe and the clarinet, and Red Army men by the brass section, you want to scream!” Mind you, MacDonald did get one thing right when he described "Testimony" as a "dishonest presentation".

As a "comprehensive demolition of the Fay/Taruskin attacks" Shostakovich Reconsidered doesn't even get to first base. The book doesn't provide anything near to a convincing explanation as to why "Testimony" contains so many pages taken verbatim from articles Shostakovich had already written and had published in the Soviet press.