No one in the audience at Sunday’s BBC National Orchestra of Wales concert can have envied pianist Jonathan Biss. It fell to Biss to open a concert that could only be utterly overwhelmed by Shostakovich’s massive Symphony no. 13 in B flat minor, “Babi Yar”. Nonetheless, he and Ryan Bancroft managed to make it more than just a light amuse-bouche.
On the one side was Bancroft, whipping up the orchestra into early Romantic symphonic grandeur, with occasional hints of the composer’s forthcoming First Symphony; on the other was Biss, reminding us a mere four years had passed since Mozart’s final piano concerto, opting for a spritely Classical chamber lucidity. There was a palpable sense of play in their stylistic tussling, though the two effectively merged when Biss reached the cadenza, delivering it with such blurring dazzlement it was as if we’d leapfrogged several decades into the full-on Romanticism of Liszt. He went the other way in the central Largo, opting for a guarded, even concealed tone, with Bancroft and the BBC NOW more forthcoming. But they were on all the same page in the closing Rondo, ebullient and transparent, beautifully shaped by Biss who was clearly leading the way.
Though substantial and compelling, the Beethoven was all too quickly forgotten as we became subsumed into the immensity of Shostakovich’s strangely rarely-performed Thirteenth Symphony. Composed to commemorate the Nazi massacre of Ukrainian Jews in the Babi Yar ravine as well as to denounce ongoing Soviet antisemitism, the emotional gear-shift in the concert could hardly have been greater.
Thus it was that bass James Platt became something akin to a prophet, crying out in a mix of despair and outrage. This was echoed and amplified in the strongest possible terms by the orchestra, Bancroft never letting the music wallow in sombre darkness but keeping it brisk, eliciting the most astonishing screaming outbursts from the orchestra. There’s loud, and then there was this; Hoddinott Hall and all of us within it literally shook at the immensity of it all. Its simpler moments were like a hymn bellowed to the world, though Platt never gave the impression that this was song, but rather a wild, pained declamation, backed up with equal grim force by the men of the BBC National Chorus of Wales.
Bancroft gave the third and fourth movements the most deathly pallor. Its warmth was that of a deep bruise, against which castanets rattled like old bones. Now Platt was more intimate, seemingly sharing his woes with us in a quiet lament. Bancroft went the other way, rupturing the music in a simply enormous, climactic blaze. Whereupon we descended into a place of blank horror, bleak and monotone, filled with strange circular staccatos and a lost tuba trying to find a voice. Here, too, the emptiness found its opposite in a black marching song and more extraordinary orchestral screams.
The performance made a satisfyingly strong connection between the second and fifth movements, the two places where Shostakovich allows the music more strength. The second was like a distorted folk music, propelled onward at a ridiculous but effective tempo, the “merry dance” mentioned in the text becoming increasingly unhinged and extreme. Though its fanfares were decidedly fin-de-siècle, there was a manic air of triumph. A reduced strain of this was continued in the finale, conveying a fragile but palpable confidence. Finally, the warmth became real, passing through a glorious fugue into what the BBC NOW rendered as excruciatingly tender chamber music. Wounds heal, pain eventually subsides; and here, beyond the most unfathomable agony, were the tentative beginnings of hope.
