Stream: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Glasgow City Halls
This was an intriguingly programmed concert, coupling Benjamin Britten’s youthful ‘Simple Symphony’ with Dmitri Shostakovich’s late 14th Symphony. In 1969, the Russian composer dedicated this work to Britten, who had become a friend through the influence of Mstislav Rostropovich, after meeting him in London for the British premiere of his cello concerto, written for and played by Rostropovich, and both admired each other enormously. Britten had dedicated his opera ‘The Prodigal Son’ to Shostakovich in 1968, and both men realised that they had much in common, as outsiders in their respective countries.
Britten’s ‘Simple Symphony’ was written long before this friendship, being a work of youthful exuberance as the 20-year old composer began to spread his wings. It was written between 1933 and 1934 and performed first by Britten with an amateur orchestra in Norwich in 1934. It is scored for a small string orchestra and uses themes that the teenage Britten had composed for piano.
The symphony is in four short movements and sounds refreshingly tuneful. In fact, I could not discern any real sign of Britten’s later style in this performance, briskly conducted by Mark Wigglesworth with the BBC SSO in an empty City Halls in Glasgow. The lack of an audience made the string tone slightly over reverberant, but at least we were hearing live music again. Listening without the knowledge of the composer, one would have been forgiven for thinking the work was by Vaughan Williams, such were the luscious harmonies and folk-like tunes popping up. By far the most effective movement for me was the second, a virtuosic piece for strings playing pizzicato, reminiscent of Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony, and with amusing hints of the ‘Archers’ theme tune, written 10 years earlier by Arthur Wood. I wonder if the players had sore fingers at the end of the movement. There were beautiful touches in the slow movement, but I got the feeling that the young Britten didn’t actually know quite how to end the symphony, as it rather petered out. Still it was an interesting novelty, very well played, and, using the same string forces as Shostakovich’s 14th, it was a sensible coupling. The Shostakovich is scored for strings and percussion, and the percussion section is enormous, with all sorts of sounds and effects. There is a lot of work for xylophone and wood blocks, gongs and castanets, vibraphone, tom toms, celesta and tubular bells. The percussion section of the BBC SSO is magnificent, and Shostakovich gives them plenty of scope.
I must declare a link with the 14th Symphony, as I studied it with Galina Vishnevskaya, for whom it was written, and have grown up with her recording along with the bass Mark Reshetin, conducted by Rudolf Barshai. On the other hand, that study was a long time ago now (in the late 80s), and I have never sung it since, nor in fact heard it, so it was marvellous to hear again Shostakovich’s bleak but beautiful take on death. He himself was ill in hospital with polio (he also suffered from Motor Neurone Disease and died 6 years later from lung cancer), so it was not surprising that his thoughts were turning to death and what it meant to him. He was not religious and realised that death is the end for every one of us, but he was fiercely opposed to life being ended by extraneous means like conflict and imprisonment. All his life he had to cope with the Soviet system which enforced orthodoxy on everything, especially music. He was continually being denounced by the authorities and was often forced to make statements with which he did not agree, just to get his music published. For their part, the authorities realised they had a musical genius in Shostakovich but couldn’t let him express himself overtly within the system. Even this symphony, a work of great emotion and profundity, has been criticised as too negative and depressing. I love it.
This was a fine performance, naturally lacking a little Russian darkness with a Scottish orchestra, English and Australian soloists and an English conductor, but full of many felicities. The symphony is a setting of 11 poems by Lorca, Rilke, Apollinaire and Kűchelbecker, translated into Russian, and was apparently a creative response to Mussorgsky’s ‘Songs and Dances of Death’, a cycle I have sung many times and which I also studied with Vishnevskaya. The bass and the soprano alternate throughout the piece and join only for the third, fourth and eleventh songs, and the movements range from slow meditations to frenzied allegros.
Elisabeth Atherton is an English soprano who is beginning to make quite a name for herself internationally. She has a versatile repertoire, firstly as a Mozart soprano, but also as a singer of contemporary music. She seems to have an affinity with Harrison Birtwistle, so Shostakovich should be a dawdle by comparison! For me, she was at her best in the more reflective songs, as some of the heavier ones taxed her, especially in the lower register. Here, she suffers from the fact that Shostakovich was writing for Vishnevskaya, one of the great singers of the 20th century, with a beautiful creamy top and a fiercely strong low register. Despite this, I felt she was a fine interpreter of the songs and grew to like her sound more and more as the cycle progressed. Her Russian was excellent!
I was prepared to dislike Joshua Bloom’s bass simply because he wasn’t me! Fortunately, I could put such puerile prejudice aside, as he sang very well and idiomatically, also in excellent Russian.
The cycle of songs that make up the 14th Symphony are a remarkable collection of texts, ranging from deeply melancholic through angry defiance to a resigned acceptance of death. The first song ‘De Profundis’, a setting of Lorca, starts with a high eerie melody on violins, and the entry of the bass voice describing the 100 lovers lying in their graves sets the scene for a meditation on death and its many appearances and guises. As Mussorgsky writes in his ‘Songs and Dances of Death’, the grim reaper can take many forms, surprising the victim with the sudden swift blow of his scythe.
I won’t attempt to go through each song and give an analysis of the whole work, but I’ll pick out a few highlights. The first time we encounter the two voices together is in ‘The Lorelei’, Apollinaire’s take on the ancient legend of the famous Siren of the Rhine who lures unsuspecting sailors to their doom. We see a mediaeval dialogue between the Lorelei and a bishop (it’s not quite “as the actress said to the bishop!”) which ends with the young girl throwing herself from the famous rock in a bend of the Rhine. She has been indicted by an ecclesiastical tribunal as a sorceress but seduces the bishop with her beauty and persuades him to send her to a nunnery rather than be burned. En route, she asks to go up on to a rock to see the Rhine, but once there, she throws herself down into the mighty river, forever to trap unwary sailors.
‘The Suicide’ is a deeply enigmatic song, for soprano, which imagines three lilies growing on a suicide’s grave. The visceral beauty of the vocal line chills the blood, as the flowers grow on the unhallowed soil, not marked by a cross, as damned as the soul of the suicide. Ms Atherton sang this very movingly, if perhaps lacking the intensity of Vishnevskaya, who, as a child, had lived through the ghastly Nazi siege of Leningrad, and had seen unspeakable things. In passing, may I recommend Galina’s autobiography, ‘Galina, a Russian Story’ which I reckon is the finest ever written by a singer. Her dedication in the front of my copy is one of my most treasured possessions.
The 6th song “Madam, look!” sees a dialogue between Death and a woman. “Madam, look, you’ve dropped something. It’s my heart! Pick it up. I gave it and took it back. It was down there in the trenches. It’s here, and I laugh. HaHaHaHa!” Really creepy, and well performed by the two singers.
One of the best titles of all songs refers to a painting in St Petersburg by Repin from the late 1880s – ‘Reply of the Zaporogue Cossacks to the Sultan of Constantinople’. The story goes that although the cossacks had defeated the army of the Sultan, he nonetheless insisted that the cossacks owed him their total allegiance and submission. The painting and the poem represent the reply given to the Sultan, as they think up more and more vulgar and offensive things to say, and the bass has a lot of fun yelling out these insults.
‘O Delvig’ is, for me, the central song of the cycle, and here, I felt that Mr Bloom missed a little of the beauty of the melodic line in his understandable desire to sing the words clearly. The melody is slightly hard to find as it weaves in and out of the orchestral texture, and I would have liked a bit more attention to that vocal line. It was good nonetheless to hear a proper bass singing this music, as there is an unfortunate tendency, particularly in Britain, to employ a baritone in repertoire which needs the deeper, mellower tones of a real bass. This has been a complaint of mine for decades, not just because I have watched the wrong voices sing my repertoire but also because it short- changes the audience. Most men have a sort of baritone voice, and it is only rarely that one finds a true bass, or a true tenor for that matter. If the music requires it, managements should engage the right voice. A similar problem occurs with mezzo-sopranos and contraltos but that’s a discussion for another day.
It is only in the final song ‘Conclusion’ by Rilke that the two voices sing in actual duet, and very effective it is. “Death is great. We are his when our mouths are full of laughter. When we think we are in the midst of life, he dares to weep in our midst!”
With that jolly thought, Shostakovich brings this extraordinary work to a close. The BBC SSO and Mark Wigglesworth gave us a treat on the radio, in this weird time. It seemed almost that, by playing this pessimistic symphony in an empty concert hall, they were showing Death that, despite his machinations with Covid-19, we, the living, the makers of music and beauty, would eventually triumph, since music lives on after our bodies have given out. The composition of the dying Shostakovich can supply solace and compassion to the living!
The concert is available on BBC Sounds.
