Prom 4: Shostakovich’s ‘Leningrad’ Symphony - 16.07.18

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Prom 4: Shostakovich’s ‘Leningrad’ Symphony
19:30 Monday 16 July 2018
Royal Albert Hall

Magnus Lindberg: Clarinet Concerto
Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No 7 in C major, 'Leningrad'

Mark Simpson clarinet
BBC Philharmonic
Juanjo Mena conductor

In his final season as its Chief Conductor, Juanjo Mena leads the BBC Philharmonic in a concert contrasting darkness and light. Magnus Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto is a modern classic, a glorious collision of tradition and innovation that is at once emotionally direct and ferociously virtuosic; a graduate of BBC Radio 3's New Generation Artist scheme and BBC Young Musician winner, Mark Simpson is the soloist. Darkness streaks across the second half with Shostakovich's heart-wrenching tribute to the Soviet victims of the Second World War - the powerful 'Leningrad' Symphony.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

It's good that the Leningrad Symphony is no longer sneered at (except by Bartok ).

[Bryn]

It's good that the Leningrad Symphony is no longer sneered at (except by Bartok ).

And even that is open to question. Might he not have been joining DSCH in haveing a tilt at Hitler's love for the Lehar?

[Richard Barrett]

It's good that the Leningrad Symphony is no longer sneered at (except by Bartok ).

This isn't a sneer but I do find this piece quite tedious and directionless for most of its duration...

[Tevot]

Hello there,

I'll be attending this Prom with family and I'm looking forward to it - particularly as it will be the first time I will have heard the Magnus Lindberg concerto live in concert ...

Best Wishes,

Tevot

[Bryn]

This isn't a sneer but I do find this piece quite tedious and directionless for most of its duration...

What, even when conducted by Ted Downes?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

This isn't a sneer but I do find this piece quite tedious and directionless for most of its duration...

That's a reasonable criticism. I was thinking of the OTT blanket dismissals suffered by certain works and composers like Grove's dismissal of Rachmaninov.

[Richard Barrett]

That's a reasonable criticism. I was thinking of the OTT blanket dismissals suffered by certain works and composers like Grove's dismissal of Rachmaninov.

There are many works by Shostakovich that I love, so I would really very much like to find something in the 7th, but (and it's not the worst offender among his symphonies as far as I'm concerned) a lot of it seems to have been written and orchestrated without a lot of thought - unlike for example the symphony that followed it - and I can well understand Bartók's frustration at the wall-to-wall coverage it was getting in the USA during his time there. If that is indeed what he's expressing in the relevant passage in his Concerto for Orchestra (which as far as I'm concerned he would have done better to omit, whatever it was supposed to be "about").

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

it's not the worst offender among his symphonies as far as I'm concerned

It is for me - the other "candidates" having the not inconsiderable merit of being half as long!

I shall probably listen - as I always do - to the performance in the hope of getting at least some pleasure from the work - and, as probably, end up after about 40 minutes wondering what I do this to myself for. After such an endurance (and, indeed, in anticipation of it), I always feel I've earned the right to indulge in a good sneer.

(And yes, Bartok's "raspberry" is the weakest point in what I consider to be the weakest work of his maturity.)

[Richard Barrett]

It is for me - the other "candidates" having the not inconsiderable merit of being half as long!

No.11 is only slightly shorter... but seems even longer to me!

[jayne lee wilson]

From the Archives.....

.....some dismiss the 7th Symphony as bombastic, vulgar etc. etc., while others grasp that it includes expression of these things within the broader compass of a communal, social(ist)-realist visionary perspective of a War Symphony. It's a filmic and programmatic piece whose idiom is rhetorical and dramatic (more David Lean than Boris Pasternak), depending upon time and space - upon obsessive sequential repetition and variation to develop its huge momentum and impact. The same could be said of the 8th and 11th. To complain from what seems to be a "purist classical" perspective about how they achieve their aims seems to miss the point of these creations - to misunderstand their idiom.

***

From the political to the personal...

I place 4 and 15 above all else in his symphonic output with 5 and 10 not far behind - but for me it HAS to be the 7th, the Great Symphony of the Siege of Leningrad.
I love it for its melody, its tragedy, its anguish and its joy. That long slow quiet anticipation through the finale, then the plunge into the coda, those almost hysterical string figurations and then - THAT MOMENT, as those snarling firebird fanfares rise, twice, against the tension, bursting for release...

Then I think back over DSCH's most glorious slow movement, the shattering requiem at the height of the first movement's blundering destructiveness... that ashen bassoon among the ruins... the broad sunlit landscape of the very beginning...
oh yes, it just has to be the 7th.

[BBMmk2]

One of my favourite works by Shostakovich. I think No.8 is mine out an out.

[Beef Oven!]

The seventh is my twelfth favourite DSCH symphony.

ferney and RB's comments reinforce my opinion, but Jayne makes it sound appetising - I should give it a listen and see if there is something in it that I like.

[Richard Barrett]

some dismiss the 7th Symphony as bombastic, vulgar etc. etc., while others grasp that it includes expression of these things within the broader compass of a communal, socialist-realist visionary perspective of a War Symphony.

So does that mean it isn't bombastic, vulgar etc. ("etc." would for me include orchestrated by the yard for the most part, spun out at enormously greater length than its mostly unmemorable material is fit for...), or that it is but it doesn't matter because it's a work of socialist-realist art?

[jayne lee wilson]

So does that mean it isn't bombastic, vulgar etc. ("etc." would for me include orchestrated by the yard for the most part, spun out at enormously greater length than its mostly unmemorable material is fit for...), or that it is but it doesn't matter because it's a work of socialist-realist art?

Neither, really, Richard. I feel I've already answered your question - see above, but to reiterate or elaborate:

Any perceived bombast or vulgarity is part of and contextualised by an all-encompassing, epic vision of “A Country at War”: a happy peaceful country, the invasion, the agony of the victims and their love for their land, a final battle and triumph.

On whatever level you take these (story, history, myth, sincerity, parody - that broad, populist cinematographic vision) to me they include impressively wide-ranging images and feelings: inspirations of beauty and nobility, tragedy and depth: the sunlit meadows of the opening, the devastating climactic requiem of the march, the main themes of the adagio (with an especially lovely, delicate, tender flute solo, one of DSCH’s most beautiful melodies, taken up heartbreakingly by the cellos); deepest, emptiest bleakness around the bassoon solo after the march's climax; the savage swagger and sarcasm of the scherzo (like the judgment, the shattered dreams, of the poet-in-the-courtroom 3rd episode in the 3rd movement of the 4th Symphony)... and so on. (One should mention a this point a fluid network of thematic cross-reference running through the whole work).

I see these moods or sound-images as “voices” - Dramatis Personae in, or scenes from, a Dramatic Symphony; so the bombast or vulgarity are part of the banality of evil, the banality of war, of the empty assumptions and blundering destructiveness of power, the sarcasms of hubris (v. Donald Trump - Sadiq Khan’s wonderful balloon is very DSCH; would you criticise it for its vulgarity?).
So to answer your question: they matter very much: they are not only “acceptable” here but essential.

***

Shostakovich wrote several different types of symphony, with several modes or registers of expression. I think that's why they're often misunderstood.

I've tried to categorise these as :

Autobiographies: 1, 4-6 and 10.
War Symphonies: 7-9
Songs and Dances of Death: 13-15.
AGITPROP: 2,3, 11, 12.