Total Shostakovich masterminded by Andris Nelsons in Leipzig

No city is marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich quite like Leipzig. Among other concerts, the Gewandhaus is mounting complete cycles of his 15 symphonies and his 15 string quartets in an 18-day musical marathon. 

Andris Nelsons is well qualified to lead the symphonic charge, both physically and musically. He looks lean and limber. Having rediscovered taekwondo during the pandemic, he now holds a second-degree black belt and is capable of snapping a 1-inch wooden board with his heel. I can well believe it. 

The Latvian is also well versed in Shostakovich’s music. Over the past decade, he recorded a full cycle with the Boston Symphony (recently packaged up into a box). Indeed, he has brought the BSO with him to Leipzig to share the cycle with his other orchestra, the Gewandhaus. Anna Rakitina, who served as Nelsons’ assistant in Boston from 2019-23, leads the First and the Fifth, conducting the specially created Shostakovich Festival Orchestra, featuring members of the Mendelssohn Orchestra Academy (Leipzig) and the Tanglewood Music Centre Orchestra (Boston). 

In a single concert, the centrepiece of the festival, I heard all three orchestras. After the youth orchestra performed the Chamber Symphony, the decks were cleared for the combined forces of the Gewandhaus (63 players) and Boston Symphony (54) for the massive – and massively loud – Leningrad Symphony. Although the two orchestras have performed side by side in Boston, this was their first joint venture in Leipzig. 

It cannot be easy, marrying two orchestras with different sounds and traditions, or playing alongside desk partners who are unfamiliar. I remember seeing this symphony with the combined forces of the Mariinsky and the Rotterdam Philharmonic, scrambling to follow Valery Gergiev’s indecipherable toothpick. Both sets of players here are experts in following Nelsons’ clearer beat. This was their third successive evening playing the Leningrad together, so they’ve had time to gel. 

This was the finest work I’ve yet seen from Nelsons. His command of the symphony’s enormous structure (80 minutes in length) was total, pacing each lengthy movement patiently, slower than Vassily Petrenko’s recent account, leading to emotionally – and dynamically – powerful climaxes. The long invasion theme of the first movement, started jauntily enough by Cynthia Meyers’ piccolo, grew into an overwhelming juggernaut of sound, occasionally threatening to derail but indomitable in its force. Well may the two Gewandhaus harpists have hunkered down, earplugs firmly deployed, while battle raged around them, Nelsons’ baton scything in horizontal slashes. In the stunned aftermath of the bombardment, credit to Axel Benoit’s hugely expressive bassoon lament. 

Nelsons found a light touch for the second movement, which Shostakovich called a “very lyrical Scherzo”, but the massed strings hit their stride in the declamatory heights of the Adagio, incredibly rich yet clean. Crouching low, Nelsons dared them to play as quietly as possible before ripping into the Mahlerian middle section with bite. There was ferocity to the slap pizzicati of the basses and cellos a few minutes into the finale, leading to the defiant I’m-still-standing triumph of the coda. Job done, ovation secured. 

In a neat bit of programming, it was possible to hear Dmitri Dmitriyevich’s Op.110 twice on the same day, both in its original Eighth String Quartet form and in its string orchestra incarnation, as arranged by Rudolf Barshai. Composed in Dresden in 1960, the score is inscribed to the “memory of victims of fascism and war”, although Shostakovich himself told Solomon Volkov in the disputed book Testimony that “you have to be blind and deaf” to believe this, the implication being that the quartet is much more personal, even autobiographical. (Tony Palmer’s film Testimony was screened here late on Friday evening.)

It opens with his D-S-C-H monogram and quotes from works like the Second Piano Trio, the First Cello Concerto and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the opera that was banned after Stalin took a dislike to it. In the aftermath of a damning Pravda editorial, Shostakovich feared for his life, and the fourth of the quartet’s five interconnected movements opens with the sharp knock at the door that the composer was dreading each night. 

Some of that angst is blunted in Barshai’s string band arrangement, although the young members of the Festival Orchestra played it with enormous spirit and focus. For raw emotion and electric tension, one needed to be at the Quatuor Danel’s afternoon recital. The second movement was played with such ferocity that stray horsehair flapped from at least two bows as the players dug into the Jewish “laughter through tears” theme. Those knocks at the door were percussively violent. 

The Quatuor Danel are no strangers to Leipzig; their second recording of the complete cycle was made in this same Mendelssohn-Saal in 2022. It’s a mark of their reputation here that this recital was sold out. They’re a fascinating quartet to watch, not least because almost all the impetus springs from leader Marc Danel. While Gilles Millet, Vlad Bogdanas and Yovan Markovitch maintain almost rigid stillness, Danel often leans so far back on his stool, left knee raised almost to his elbow, that one fears for his balance. 

From the apparent gentility of the Sixth to the dissonance and frayed nerves of the Eleventh, the Danel played with masterful authority. Outside of Russia, there is nobody to touch them in this repertoire, with the Eighth particularly stunning. 

Mark's accommodation was funded by Leipzig Tourism