New York Philharmonic Play Dmitri Shostakovich

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 31 January 2025 14:42

Written by Jack Angstreich

Keri-Lynn Wilson directing the New York Philharmonic. Photo by Chris Lee

At Lincoln Center’s excellent David Geffen Hall, on the night of Thursday, December 5th, I had the considerable pleasure to attend a fabulous concert of Soviet orchestral music presented by the New York Philharmonic under the very impressive direction of Keri-Lynn Wilson, in her debut with this ensemble.

The event started superbly with a dazzling account of Dmitri Shostakovich irresistible and irrepressible Festive Overture, Op. 96, from 1954. The orchestra’s concertmaster, Frank Huang, then entered the stage for a highly creditable performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s incomparable Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63, from 1935. In his Short Autobiography from 1939-41, the composer wrote about it as follows:

Reflecting my nomadic concertizing experience the concerto was written in the most diverse countries: the main subject of the first movement was written in Paris, the first theme of the second movement in Voronezh, the instrumentation was completed in Baku, and the premiere took place in December of 1935 in Madrid. 

In his useful notes for this program, James M. Keller provides some relevant background on the work:

Prokofiev had already been amassing sketches for some vaguely imagined violin piece when he was approached by some admirers of the French-Belgian violinist Robert Soëtens, who asked for a concerto that their friend might premiere and to which he would maintain exclusive performance rights for a year. Soëtens, a devoted champion of new music, had previously joined with Samuel Dushkin to present the premiere, in 1932, of Prokofiev's Sonata for Two Violins, and Prokofiev was eminently disposed toward providing a follow-up piece. Jascha Heifetz started programming it immediately after Soëtens's year expired, and the concerto has been a staple of the repertoire ever since. Prokofiev initially thought of titling the piece Concert Sonata for Violin and Orchestra, but by the time he finished his composition he gave up that unnecessary complication and called it simply Violin Concerto No. 2, his Violin Concerto No. 1 having been premiered a dozen years earlier. 

The initial, Allegro moderato opens solemnly, even lugubriously—with a theme that returns later on in the movement—and then quickly becomes agitated; much of this movement has an inward quality but it becomes more extroverted, even jaunty, as the tempo accelerates and then becomes recurringly lyrical with numerous, diverse developments before ending quietly and unexpectedly. The second movement, which is a model of elegance, is restrained and also song-like, lovely but not without a playfulness that intensifies; it concludes softly as well. The Allegro ben marcato finale is more forceful if also ludic, even eccentric; it becomes more energetic and then closes abruptly.

The second half of the evening was at least equally memorable: a stunning realization of Shostakovich’s extraordinary  

Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93, from 1953, performed alongside a screening of what appeared to be a distinguished film—commissioned by the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester and first screened on June 15, 2022, in Lucerne, Switzerland—by the South African artist William Kentridge, who several years ago notably directed and designed a striking Metropolitan Opera production of the composer’s The Nose, after the famous story by Nikolai Gogol, starring Paulo Szot. In May 2022, the filmmaker had this to say about his creation:

The key task … is to find something that does not turn the symphony into film music — a series of images and narratives that overwhelm the music itself; nor to have something that … runs simply as a series of anodyne backdrops. But the story of Shostakovich and his complicated relationship to the state in the Soviet Union … provides the material for thinking visually about the trajectory that Shostakovich had to follow, from the early days of the Soviet Union to the writing of the symphony. This is a retrospective look at … four decades … from the perspective of 1953, when both Stalin died and the first performance of the symphony was presented. In the 1920s there was the death of Lenin; in the 1930s the suicide of Mayakovsky; in the 1940s, the assassination of Trotsky; in the 1950s the death of Stalin — and here we are, almost 70 years later. The report that remains of these decades is in the music of Shostakovich, the one who against expectation got away, and survived. The film is set inside what appears to be an abandoned Soviet museum, which in fact is made of cardboard, on the table in the artist's studio …. Using a miniature camera, we move through the different halls of the museum, which also include a community theater hall, a public swimming pool, a quarry at the side of the main halls of the museum. A corridor of vitrines holding stuffed historical figures. Intertitles in the film are from various sources, but the main source are the plays and poems of Vladimir Mayakovsky — who in the early years following the revolution was an enthusiastic supporter of the Soviet project. But as the years passed and the hopes of the revolution receded, he grew increasingly disillusioned. In 1930 he shot himself. … The central characters of the film are Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin; Shostakovich and his student Elmira Nazirova (about which there are different theories regarding her relationship with Shostakovich and the 10th Symphony and whether her name is embedded into some of the key signatures of the symphony); and Mayakovsky and his lover, Lilya Brik. These characters appear as puppets, but are also performed by actors inside of puppets. The form is one of collage, and the larger proposition is that one needs to understand history as a form of collage. The artistic medium is a way of thinking about the historical events. The task of the project is to try to show within the visual film some of the ambiguities Shostakovich had to negotiate … in all the work that he made. We have to find a way to both acknowledge the independence of the music — that it exists now in the post-Soviet era (we can still feel the emotional journey of the symphony, independent of its historical moorings), but at the same time acknowledge the particular character of the era from which it comes.

About the music, the annotator records the following:

Shostakovich began his Symphony No. 10 only a few months after Stalin's death. Or perhaps earlier; the pianist Tatyana Nikolaeva, one of his confidants, insisted that the symphony — and unquestionably its first movement — dated from 1951, and that the piece, like so many others, was withheld until after Stalin's passing. The symphony scored a notable success at its premiere as well as at follow-up performances in Moscow.

The first, Moderato movement begins very gravely and slowly becomes more animated but no less serious; it builds to a powerful climax before reverting to a subdued manner. The ensuing, very brief Allegro is urgent and propulsive while the succeeding Allegretto is weighty and sober but becomes more insistent and dramatic although it closes gently. The finale too is stark in outlook at its outset but turns livelier with some jocular inflections before concluding rousingly and affirmatively. The artists were enthusiastically applauded, deservedly.