Can Shostakovich without bitterness still be Shostakovich? Can a performer still do justice to his music if their interpretation does not match the style and tone of Soviet-era musicians? These questions rise to the fore as the living memory of Dmitri Shostakovich fades further with every passing year. The first decades of the 21st century have been years of transition in how the composer’s music is played. Gone is the febrile intensity heard on recordings conducted by those who knew the composer personally; the expressive power heightened by the raw sonorities of mid-20th-century Soviet orchestras. Today one finds Shostakovich refracted through a prism of immaculate technical polish.
Coupled with that is a willingness to put Shostakovich’s music into a broader context. The sensitive listener may not be aware of the great purges of the Stalinist years or the icy stagnation of the Brezhnev regime, but they will be no less moved by his music. Vasily Petrenko’s reading of the composer’s Symphony no. 10 last Friday at Disney Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic was of Shostakovich as a figure that stands over and apart from his era; his art breaking free from the fetters of his time and place. It is no longer solely the music of Russia, solely music of the 20th century. It is the world’s music now; universal in appeal and emotion.
Petrenko’s carefully paced and shaded rendering of the symphony’s massive opening movement – a 20-odd-minute architectural marvel of a Moderato built on a terse, six-note cell – immediately signaled a different outlook. There was no resignation, no anguish, no sense of the music shrouded in penumbral ambiguity. Petrenko sharply defined the music’s features with telling rhythmic and textural clarity that gave – or rather exposed – the music’s backbone. It was a heroic view of the movement that crackled with Beethovenian defiance. Sorrow and pain there certainly was, but it never descended into bathos. The screeching climax was crushing, but also cathartic. Throughout, the music was illuminated with hope tempered with anger.
That anger exploded with near-unstoppable fury in the whirling second movement. Textures remained transparent, but the menace – and malice – in the music did not dim in the slightest. Even a cymbal miscue early in the movement failed to impede the scherzo’s momentum.
In the third movement again Petrenko turned a light on an aspect of the composer not often considered. Where other conductors make the third movement into a mechanical, grotesque dance, Petrenko took a more lyrical direction. The Mahlerian horn-calls, which hauntingly echo the Austrian’s Das Lied von der Erde and recur throughout the movement, were not stentorian and implacable, but soft, even seductive. Recent musicological research has found that the horn motif encodes the name of a woman Shostakovich had fallen in love during the symphony’s gestation. Romance and lyricism are not terms usually associated with the composer, but both orchestra and conductor found rich veins of both in this movement.