Sir Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra offered a fascinating juxtaposition at the Barbican of two sombre 20th-century works, compositions by good friends who employed contrasted moods and means to achieve their bleak outcomes.
Britten’s Violin Concerto of 1939 arose from the dark times in which the young composer saw Europe in turmoil, riven by the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Nazism, and sought to express his despondency in music. The composer’s constant meshing of major and minor chords, especially in the agonised finale, prompted music that grinds the spirit even today (today more than ever, some would say). As with Europe itself, despair hangs suspended without resolution or redemption.
Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony of 1953, on the other hand, is scorched earth music: an evocation of wickedness in four movements that depicts a malignant machine at work with the composer himself as its victim. If Britten’s concerto was a response to the world he saw from afar, his Russian colleague was articulating disturbing experiences of his own. The last two movements of the Tenth are littered with statements of the composer’s personalised DSCH motif – initially a giant finger accusing him, subsequently an army of galloping demons chasing him to earth. The sum of the symphony’s parts feels like an inversion of Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben. ‘A Victim’s Death’, perhaps.
Pappano, ever the musical dramatist, painted the symphony in harrowing tones of charcoal grey overlaid with moments of utter darkness. In the opening movement, for example, he lent a haunted shade to the tripping second subject which seemed, in his baton-free hands, to evoke ghosts playing hopscotch in a wasteland. The Adagio third was an irreligious Dies irae with a Mahlerian horn solo and a spectral cor anglais passage that heralded a Più mosso of pure terror, while the finale began in a sinister mood as brief woodwind solos brushed the face like fronds of evil. Whereupon the chase was on, with Pappano the charioteer whipping his forces to attack the fleeing DSCH.
While Shostakovich employed dissonance as a shock tactic, Britten used it as a halfway house in a vain quest for peace. Janine Jansen, who always impresses in this concerto, communed throughout both with the score and with her fellow musicians, emphasising the work’s Alban Berg connections from the outset through a plaintive, wispy opening statement that blossomed into aching colours, mostly tonal but never quite settled, that spoke of thwarted hope and pessimism. Pappano gave the Vivace second movement a surprising tang of Berlioz – something I’ve never noticed before – until the elemental Passacaglia drew the audience, Jansen’s fellow travellers, towards a lingering conclusion of exquisite misery. Never has beauty carried such a weight of sadness.
