It was the stuff that dreams, and nightmares, were made of. Thursday night’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra concert paired one of the repertoire’s ultimate crowdpleasers, Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, with its polar opposite, Shostakovich’s vast, bleak Symphony No. 8.
Michael Seal and Boris Giltburg had clearly decided that the Rachmaninov should be no mere frothy palette-cleanser. Soloist and orchestra alike were brisk and agile, staccatos everywhere, shaping the work’s endless gear changes via strong, distinct characterisations. There was more than a hint of Hollywood-esque glamour in the music’s lustrous sheen, yet Seal consistently refused to milk it, and these revels were gone in an instant, lost via Giltburg’s lightning-fast fingers (becoming a literal blur), passing almost recklessly fast through a dream-like continuity such that Paganini’s melody seemed to be everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Giltburg’s astonishing clarity and precision were entirely matched by the CBSO, to the extent that the work took on the qualities of a concerto for orchestra.
Shostakovich’s Eighth is not often heard in UK concert halls, and as such Seal had evidently decided that absolutely no-one in Symphony Hall should be allowed to ever forget the experience. Its five movements were presented as a single, cohesive tapestry, rooted in a dark, difficult solemnity, by turns robust and fragile, all born out of desperation. Throughout there was the palpable sense of an in-depth, considered yet still raw argument being laid out in the work’s twisting structure. From a glimpse of a possibility of grandeur we suddenly found ourselves in an extended shrill cry of pure, infinite anguish. This climax was as close to genuinely terrifying as I’ve ever heard in a concert hall, jaw-dropping and ear-splitting, making the hushed conclusion an uncomfortable demonstration of quietly throbbing pain.
No composer captures jaunty grotesquerie better than Shostakovich, and the CBSO turned the second movement into a kind of danse macabre. No less piercing than what had gone before, it was like a party for the end of the world, teetering on the edge of an abyss, smiling a rictus grin the whole time. And then we plunged, seemingly ever downwards through the central Allegro non troppo, a spiralling essay in sheer relentlessness, driving on, Beckett-like, for the sake of driving on. Seal transformed it into the kind of “non-music” Ravel described his Bolero as being, an insane, unstoppable machine. Eliciting more shrill cries, and becoming unhinged in its bonkers galloping trumpet sequence (like an imaginary cavalry arriving), we ended up, yet again, in the midst of another heart-stoppingly crushing climax.
Appropriately, Seal and the CBSO made the ensuing passacaglia music of shell-shock, a dazed, blasted aftermath of the kind that E E Cummings once wrote, “where everything’s nothing / arise, my soul, and sing”. A horn, a piccolo: lone voices of desolation singing out in the fractured air, while the lower strings revealed in the contours of the repeating bass-line echoes of the symphony’s opening. Had we ended up back where we started? Shot dead where we were standing?
In the best sense, there was something impossible – or, at least, implausible – about the final movement. Shostakovich’s down-up motif, recurring everywhere, had finally been inverted, and the CBSO responded with enthusiasm, sharing it fugally, contrapuntally, like a new communal idea spreading. Hope? Triumph? No. Soon enough, we were enclosed in deafening horror, and while the brass managed to blaze through it, and the bass clarinet put a brave face on what lay beyond, Seal made its closing moments fittingly ambiguous. Here was no peace, no serenity, but the muffled repose of ears still ringing from carnage.
