Perhaps it’s stretching a point to claim that it was downhill all the way for Shostakovich after he was forced to cancel the premiere of his Fourth Symphony in 1936, but there’s no doubt that it marked a turning point in his career, and that his music was never the same afterwards. Composed as a result of Stalin’s condemnation of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, it was put into cold storage until the cultural thaw of the Khrushchev years allowed it finally to receive its premiere in 1961. Now the Fourth stands as evidence of what might have been in Shostakovich’s symphonic development, combining a Mahlerian sense of scale with the modernist tendencies of its three slighter predecessors.
It’s a work in which everything seems to break open, laying bare every nerve and sinew of the music, and performances should never attempt to disguise that rawness. But John Storgårds’ account seemed to do just that. This huge score was superbly played by an expanded BBC Philharmonic, but some of its expressionist edges were blunted. Even the big climaxes of the first movement seemed to lack real intensity, with episodes laid out like a frieze rather than accumulating into a convincing whole. This tendency to present the symphony in self-contained units became even more pronounced in the finale, which needs no encouragement to ramble, but here really did seem like an album of grotesque snapshots, vivid certainly, but effectively diminishing the impact of one of the greatest 20th-century symphonies.
Before the symphony, Storgårds had conducted the first Proms performance of a BBC co-commission, Cassandra Miller’s viola concerto, I Cannot Love Without Trembling; with Lawrence Power the spellbinding soloist. Like the work’s title, the quotations that preface its four verses and final cadenza come from the French philosopher Simone Weil; it is, says Miller, about “the basic human need to lament”. The viola’s keening lines, derived from a funeral lament from the Epirus mountains of northern Greece, do the lamenting, with fragile, shimmering figures over slowly pulsing orchestra chords; the textures are subdued until a sudden rocketing piccolo solo signals the start of the viola’s cadenza, which seems to push the laments to the point of breakdown. It’s a strangely beautiful piece, so intimate it seems out of place in a huge public space like this.
• Available on BBC Sounds. The BBC Proms continue until 14 September.
