Oh To Believe in Another World: Shostakovich and Stalin on film at the Multitudes festival

Shostakovich knew a thing or two about writing for cinema. He composed over 30 film scores and, in his youth, earned money improvising piano accompaniments for silent films. Of his fifteen symphonies, the Eleventh – sometimes dubbed “a film score without a film” – is subtitled “The Year 1905”, depicting Bloody Sunday at St Petersburg’s Winter Palace in cinematic detail. Step back to his plotless Tenth though and commentators have imposed their own narrative – Shostakovich under the shadow of Stalin – a theme seized by William Kentridge for his film to accompany the symphony. 

Oh to Believe in Another World, commissioned by the Lucerne Symphony, premiered in 2022. It was adopted here by the Philharmonia, conducted by Marin Alsop, as part of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes, a festival where orchestral music is “reimagined for all the senses” in “genre-crossing encounters”. After the circus thrills that accompanied the London Philharmonic’s Daphnis et Chloé the night before, this felt distinctly tamer – there’s less sense of jeopardy for the conductor without a flying acrobat whizzing past your back for starters. 

But Kentridge is walking his own tightrope, wanting his film to be neither an “anodyne backdrop” nor to turn the symphony itself into background film music. We’re a society so addicted to visual stimuli, so glued to our screens, that the latter is a real danger. Afterwards, I remembered a lot of detail about Kentridge’s film, while the musical performance has already all but faded from memory. 

Kentridge takes the audience through the decades from the 1917 revolution to 1953, the year Stalin died and Shostakovich’s Tenth premiered. It has a patchwork collage feel, employing cardboard cutouts and stop-motion film, set in what feels like an abandoned museum of memories, stuffed with figures from Soviet history: a thrusting Lenin, Stalin, looking like one of Mussorgsky’s Unhatched Chicks, and Shostakovich himself, an enthusiastic initial supporter of the revolution, conducting with a red flag as a baton. 

It helps if you know some Soviet history and who the other characters are: Leon Trotsky, Elmira Nazirova (the student Shostakovich fell for), Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who shot himself in the head in 1930, and his lover, Lilya Brik. Kentridge’s imagery veers between the comic and the grotesque, ending in a round of Russian roulette featuring disapproved Politburo members where Stalin is pulling the trigger. 

There is also use made of archive footage – including Shostakovich himself composing at the piano, puffing away at a cigarette, Anna Pavlova dancing The Dying Swan – interspersed with silent film-style captions with quotes, mostly taken from Mayakovsky: “Twisting my face into a question mark” was a phrase that lingers. 

Musically, the Philharmonia’s performance felt dutiful, serving the film rather than imposing its own presence, Alsop adopting measured tempi. The Philharmonia’s woodwinds added character, particularly the gnarly bassoons, and Sarah Pennington’s third movement horn solo, playing Shostakovich’s “Elmira” theme, rang out nobly. But against the film, it sometimes felt relegated to background music. On Sunday, another Shostakovich symphony is given the film treatment: the Leningrad in the hands of Kirill Serebrennikov. Let’s see. 

Before the “show” came what Alsop does best – conducting the music of her mentor, Leonard Bernstein, grooving to the syncopated rhythms of the Chichester Psalms. The Philharmonia Chorus blended beautifully in Bernstein’s plush polyphony and the fearless treble soloist Hugo Walkom, in Tiffin School blazer, was outstanding in the second movement’s setting of Psalm 23. 

Without film, the giant screen used to project surtitles instead, here was music allowed to speak for itself, a plea for peace and unity… just what the world needs right now.