Prom 16: Shostakovich Symphony No. 4 – BBC Philharmonic – Live Review

Wednesday 31 July 2024

Royal Albert Hall, London

*****

Searing Shostakovich, and a Profound Lament from Cassandra Miller

Wednesday evening’s Prom featured the BBC Philharmonic conducted by their Chief Conductor, John Storgårds. It began with a new work, I cannot love without trembling, a viola concerto written by the Canadian composer Cassandra Miller for Lawrence Power, who premiered the work with the Brussels Philharmonic in March 2023. The concerto takes its title from a quotation from the French philosopher, Simone Weil (1909-1943), in a letter she wrote to another French philosopher Gustave Thibon,

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling”

Quotation from Weil’s Gravity and Grace, published posthumously by Gustave Thibon

The concerto has four movements or verses with a closing cadenza, each part taking its name from a Weil quotation, and it runs without a break. Weil’s Gravity and Grace describes what separates us and what brings us together, based on the Platonic concept of μεταξύ (‘metaxu’ or ‘metaxy’ meaning ‘between’). Miller heard recordings of the violinist Alexis Zoumbas who left the northern mountains of Greece in the early nineteenth century to go to New York. According to the Mississippi records website,

“Zoumbas had the rare gift of expressing emotion clearly and urgently through his instrument, and his violin feels like an extension of his heart, soul, and the deep musical history of his faraway home in Epirus”

Zoumbas’ improvisations evoke a feeling of Ξενατία (Xenatia), Greek for a ‘catastrophic longing for home’, based on Mοιρολόϊ (moiroloi), Greek mourning songs. Miller internalised Zoumbas’ moiroloi recording by singing along over and over again, creating a sacred ritual based on deep meditation. Miller describes this as ‘automatic singing’, which seems akin to automatic writing. The result is a spellbinding piece of music in which the audience shares her dreams and rituals, and joins her in the intense sense of mourning and lamentation that the piece conveys. Even the soloist is invited to share this meditative state – at one point the score instructs the violist to play ‘with eyes closed.’ The orchestra is invited to join the collective dreaming, often playing sotto voce, surrounding the soloist with shimmering, muted soundscapes. As Miller says,

“Within Zoumbas’ plaintive song, I sought a metaphysical space in which to dream – a space of separation-connection-absence-presence – in the hope to lament and to dream together in this hall tonight.“

On Wednesday evening, Lawrence Power was a superbly virtuosic advocate, an ideal focus for the piece. The orchestra provided brief moments of gently ecstatic lyricism, and at one point almost drowned the viola with brass flourishes and chattering woodwind, and there was a snatch of hope as a solo flute brought a moment of glowing light. But the pervading mood was mournful, with slow-moving orchestral textures, and a passage where the basses slowly sank down is if drowning, and another where the orchestra appeared to sink into the abyss.

There were two particularly remarkable sections in the solo part. Accompanied by distant thunder from the bass drum, Lawrence Power rhythmically plucked a single note while the melody he played floated anxiously above and below. And the closing cadenza had a frenzied solo part, a bowed marimba shimmering with light as the soloist seemed to be fighting an intense internal battle with himself, while the strummings and murmurings of the orchestral strings tried to console him. At the end, Power held his bow aloft in deserved triumph and there was a long silence as the audience contemplated what they had just heard. As the applause rose around the hall, a spotlight fell on the composer who clapped and blew kisses at the performers.

Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, which we heard in the second half of the concert, has a very different back story from the Miller piece. Shostakovich began writing it after the international success of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1934. But his world turned much darker a year later when Stalin and party officials attended a production and the state newspaper Pravda condemned the opera as ‘Muddle instead of Music’, due to its “leftist’ confusion, instead of natural, human music.’ The opera was immediately withdrawn, but Shostakovich continued with his symphony, and began rehearsing it with a view to performing it in late 1936. In circumstances that are not entirely clear, the symphony was withdrawn and was not performed until 1961, some years after the death of Stalin .

Shostakovich was studying Mahler when he wrote the symphony, and some Mahlerian influence can be heard, but it is Mahler through the lens of the later composer’s anguished, bitter, sarcastic sensibility; Shostakovich remains distinctly himself. In the programme note, Pauline Fairclough acknowledges the debt to Mahler, particularly in the second movement, but she also points out that Shostakovich wrote his symphony in ‘acutely difficult circumstances’ and that the work, ‘seems to mark the country’s descent into a profound darkness paralysed by fear.’

Fairclough states that the symphony is, ‘today regarded as one of Shostakovich’s greatest works, despite its difficult history.’ The musicologist Robert Philip is more circumspect; he says,

“critics continue to debate whether it really forms a coherent whole, or is more of a gigantic improvisation, full of sudden effects that have little or no relationship with each other.”

The symphony lacks the immediacy and strong melodies of the composer’s fifth and tenth symphonies, and it’s no coincidence that those two works have been performed 66 times at the Proms between them, as opposed to 13 times for the Fourth. But conductor John Storgårds was a passionate and entirely convincing advocate for the piece, bringing a monumental intensity to a performance that gripped from beginning to end, his energy throughout ensuring that the piece felt much more coherent than some critics may have suggested.

The orchestra shared their conductor’s passion and commitment to the piece and its hugely contrasting dynamics and musical styles. The whole orchestra played superbly; the woodwind in particular shone throughout, and special mention should be made of the stunning playing of bassoonist Roberto Giaccaglia. Later the trombonist Richard Brown provided a wonderful solo just before the brass finale in which Mahler is seen through a fever dream, accompanied by demonic percussion. The ending was remarkable; Shostakovich could easily have chosen to finish on the Mahlerian funeral march, but, like the ending of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, it’s dark, troubled and ambiguous. Against a C minor chord on strings, a celesta provides anxious arpeggios, ending on a D leaving the thought hanging in the air. After a long gap of silence, the audience applauded for a full six minutes, many standing to acknowledge the superb performance and enthusiastically acknowledging individual soloists and separate sections of the orchestra. Storgårds gestured to the score of the symphony on his music stand, as if acknowledging the composer’s genius, leaving some audience members to wonder what might have happened to the composer’s musical development if it hadn’t been for that fateful article in Pravda that cast such a dark shadow over the rest of his life.

Programme

Cassandra Miller I cannot love without trembling * (Viola Concerto)
Dmitry Shostakovich Symphony No. 4 in C minor

*Co-commissioned by BBC Radio 3, Brussels Philharmonic, Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, and Scottish Chamber Orchestra; supported by The Viola Commissioning Circle

Performers

BBC Philharmonic, conducted by John Storgårds (Chief Conductor)
Lawrence Power, viola

Sources

Cassandra Miller’s website
Faber music website
The Classical Music Lover’s Companion to Orchestral Music by Robert Philip (Yale 2020)
The Proms Archive
The Proms Guide 2024
Prom 16 Concert programme book

This concert is available to listen on BBC sounds and via the Radio 3 website until the end of the Proms