The Orchestre de Paris and Klaus Mäkelä get to the essence of Shostakovich’s Eleventh

Motionless, facing the orchestra, legs slightly apart and knees slightly flexed, Klaus Mäkelä waits for the Philharmonie audience to ready itself to listen. And God knows – or, at least, Marx and his acolytes know – just how singular a work Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11 is, the kind of work one thinks about while emitting sighs that Pierre Boulez would not have disowned, he who saw in the Soviet composer a “fifth impression of Mahler”, but one to which one always succumbs – or nearly always. Nonetheless, once again, the question of authenticity rears its head. For sure, there's no questioning the sincerity of the composer, whose work is celebrating the 1905 uprisings harshly repressed by the tsar, the prelude to the 1917 October Revolution, but of the authenticity of sound that has been at the heart of the art of interpretation since the emergence of the “historically informed” movement.

This music contains everything in its printed score, but its sonic and spiritual embodiment remains anchored in the aesthetic of the Soviet orchestras and in an era marked by Communist dictatorial control of a society still living in fear, well after de-Stalinisation, meeting up spasmodically in concert halls to commune without risk. Among 20th-century composers, Shostakovich is definitely the one whose music is consonant with its period in history, with vibrato and a piercing sound in the winds, of virtuoso strings unleashed, attacking the sound without blunting it, of Soviet recordings whose lack of sophistication in the sound give an access to this music which is direct, raw, moving, sometimes violent. In contrast, the irreproachable performances of his symphonies by Bernard Haitink and Concertgebouw have something civilised about them, something “Western”. Especially so since the quotes and echos of revolutionary songs mean nothing to a non-Russian listener and cannot therefore have the slightest Pavlovian effect on their consciousness.

It is with great fortune that the Orchestre de Paris has retained in its reptilian brain the thing which made the glory of the Société de concerts du Conservatoire which was its parent, and which in the end is not so far from that of the Russian orchestras, even if the Fagott has (alas) replaced the agile and cheeky basson, even if the strings have become denser, even if the horns now have the results of modern progress: it plays without “virtuosifying” its style. In short, the OdP finds the right sound, inasmuch as that's possible, as it does naturally in Ravel (by the way, we'd love to hear their boss conduct the complete ballet of Daphnis et Chloé). For sure, Mäkelä knows his Shostakovich from studying the scores, but he has also listened to a lot of recordings from Moscow, where this symphony was first performed in 1957, marking the rehabilitation of the composer, cleared of the accusations of formalism levelled against him nine years earlier by Zhdanov.

Mäkelä runs the four movements together without a break, tense, alternating sprawling soundscapes and tragic outbursts, without any release, with no emphasis alien to the work in a first movement over which looms a fearful threat, in a second movement which culminates in a second part whose terrifying violence seems devoid of sonic limits, conducted with a mastery, a clarity of baton movement and an orchestral balance that are perfect. We hear each instrumental part and all of them united together in a common purpose whose spiritual eloquence binds the audience with the conductor and the musicians into an emotional experience rarely encountered in a concert. An hour in, the symphony ends in a deathly quiet, the conductor's arms raised, immobile. We have been overwhelmed by an interpretation which combined the power of gesture characteristic of Sir Georg Solti and the spiritual force of the older Herbert von Karajan, who engulfed the audience into a world from which it was hard to escape. 

As for Yunchan Lim, he was perfect in a Rachmaninov Piano Concerto no. 2 in C minor taut as a bowstring, intense and without an ounce of sentimentality, carried by a 20-year old pianistic UFO who possesses every secret of the keyboard, not just fingers of steel. This perfect musician understands the extent to which this is a puritan's music – and by the way, he seems to be the kind who rarely laughs. He is in perfect unison with the musicians and the conductor: they advance without posing or running, they sing without feeling sorry for themselves, they fight without emphasis. There's a performance which puts out of our mind a recent Schumann concerto in Paris and confirms that this South Korean is indeed the young giant of the piano that we saw at the Van Cliburn Competition.

Translated from French by David Karlin