Andris Nelsons began his Shostakovich cycle only a few months after he became the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director in 2014. The first release, which featured the 10th Symphony, appeared three years ago, and its explosive, high-definition approach seems to have set the tone for what has followed – a set bringing together the Fifth, Eighth and Ninth Symphonies the following year, and now this pairing of the Fourth and the 11th.
It may be an exaggeration to say that the set juxtaposes the greatest and the least convincing of all 15 of Shostakovich’s symphonies, but the two works are certainly very different. The Fourth is a work of uncompromising directness – far too uncompromising for Stalinist Russia in the 1930s, when, in the wake of the official condemnation of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the symphony was withdrawn before its premiere. It was not heard until 1961. Meanwhile the 11th, depicting the events of the 1905 revolution, adheres very much to Soviet prescription, and is an unashamedly programmatic and populist work, sometimes almost cinematic in its literalness.
The problem with these performances, though, is that it is very hard to tell any difference of character between the two symphonies. Recorded with almost overbearing vividness, they both parade the brittleness and brilliance that seem to have become trademarks of Nelsons’ work with the Boston orchestra. The opening of the first movement of the 11th, the Palace Square, with its cushions of muted strings and lonely trumpet and horn calls, is undeniably beautiful, but then so are almost all the musical images that they conjure up. Whether that beauty is any more than superficial, though, is hard to say, and for all the brilliance of the playing in the Fourth there is little sense of the fierce, tragic statement it ought to be.
This week’s other picks
A symphony of a very different kind is included on the second volume in Chandos’s survey of Richard Rodney Bennett’s orchestral music – the single movement Symphony No 2, completed in 1967, and premiered by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. As John Wilson’s performance with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra shows, it stands up well as a fabulously fluent, brilliantly scored piece, typical of early Bennett, while the rest of the disc ranges across the changing styles of his later career, from the 1970s to the 1990s, with the Serenade, the Partita, and the Concerto for Stan Getz, in which Howard McGill is the tenor-saxophone soloist.
