Uchida’s Beethoven meets Shostakovich’s farewell at Carnegie Hall

Pairing Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony may feel like a collision of incompatible worlds. One is a work of poised serenity and classical grace, shaped by inward lyricism and formal elegance; the other, the composer's farewell to the symphonic genre, is a death-haunted patchwork of quotation and irony, its gestures veering between the grotesque and the cryptic.

Still, the Carnegie Hall programme served as a culminating point for two major initiatives. It marked the final chapter of Dame Mitsuko Uchida’s three-year Perspectives residency – a series that showcased her intellectual rigour and interpretive depth across recitals, concertos and chamber collaborations. It also brought closure to Andris Nelsons’s decade-long exploration of Shostakovich’s symphonies with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a cycle now complete in performance and on disc.

Uchida’s rendition didn’t quite start on the right foot. After playing only a few notes of the solo opening phrase, she paused, distracted by coughing in the hall, and restarted. A subtle unease lingered, with occasional slack coordination between soloist and orchestra in the first movement. Still, Uchida brought to her interpretation a refined, inward sensibility. Her tone remained composed, never mannered. Finely contoured phrasing lent a sense of quiet renewal to even the most familiar lines. At times, her harmonic shading recalled Mozart, the rhythmic brightness towards the end suggesting a Classical world viewed with affectionate detachment.

The slow movement, by contrast, seemed to foreshadow Schubert. The orchestra’s chords were met with a piano line that felt less like a rebuttal than a plea. Uchida’s tone – hushed yet unwavering – conveyed something fragile and enduring: a soft-spoken defiance. The Rondo dispelled the slow movement’s gravity with wit and rhythmic clarity, its shifts between energy and lyricism shaped with understated play. Nelsons and the BSO provided solid support. The sense of alignment between soloist, conductor and orchestra grew markedly clearer after the unsettled first movement.

After the interval, the mood darkened. Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 15 stands as one of the most original orchestral statements of the postwar era. Built on a grand scale yet fragmented, it withholds narrative and emotional catharsis, dwelling instead on memory, unbidden quotations and the impossibility of finding a final meaning. The first movement evokes a toyshop of brittle cheer – glockenspiel, flute and Rossini’s William Tell – but what begins in parody dissolves, movement by movement, into music of growing isolation and unease, as the spectre of death emerges with increasing clarity.

The first movement was polished and rhythmically taut, underlining the ensemble’s cohesiveness. The second, by contrast, stood out for its individual contributions – from the warm-toned principal cellist Blaise Déjardin to Concertmaster Nathan Cole, particularly in his dialogue with Mark Roylance's tuba. It was an exchange that underscored Shostakovich’s singular orchestration, allowing instruments from opposite ends of the sonic spectrum to converse in a language at once fragile and strangely intimate.

The Scherzo, terse and sharply drawn, quickly flickered by – more a cesura than a transformation. The Finale, however, carried proper weight. Nelsons paced its long unfolding with clarity and restraint, letting its shifting emotional currents gradually cohere into something stark and disquieting. Shostakovich, long engaged with Mahler’s legacy, wove in unmistakable allusions to the Ninth Symphony – its suspended stillness, its long goodbye. But where Mahler’s farewell reaches toward transcendence, Shostakovich’s offers, six decades later, no solace. His final pages unfold in a world stripped of hope – religious, ideological or personal. The percussion, cold and mechanical, ticked out the final moments with chilling detachment. Nelsons held the silence unflinchingly, letting it settle not as release, but as mere disappearance.