The Royal Scottish National Orchestra ended their season with ‘Spectacular Shostakovich’ in a thrilling performance more than matching the billing. Programming a single composer allowed a deeper dive below the music into hidden agendas. An overture smuggling in passages which had once seen him denounced, a haunting Cold War cello concerto and then the huge sweep of a symphony depicting the events of the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre but composed at the time of the brutal response to the Hungarian uprising, Shostakovich’s music is never less than intriguing.
The concert marked two important events. Thomas Søndergård was a last-minute jump-in to conduct the RSNO in Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11 in 2009, a pivotal performance eventually seeing him appointed as Music Director. They certainly rekindled the old magic here. The opening Festive Overture was performed by this orchestra in the Usher Hall in the presence of the composer himself in 1962. Here, Søndergård took the tuneful music at a vigorous lick, his players bristling with energy. Strong string articulation built waves of excitement, the powerful brass blowing the shrieking woodwinds along in this popular orchestral firework.
Changing the exuberant mood to deep introspection was the Second Cello Concerto, written for Mstislav Rostropovich in the Cold War, reflecting unease under the Brezhnev regime. Daniel Müller-Schott captured atmosphere with a deeply sonorous solo developing into quiet brooding conversations with the orchestral players. Brighter woodwinds and xylophone lifted the mood, but the pungent contrabassoon and menacing cellos and basses saw Müller-Schott descending to deep gloom. The Allegretto’s Odessa ‘bread roll’ folk tune was played out bravely, Müller-Schott more animated and restless. A fanfare from two horns introduced a golden-toned cadenza accompanied only by a soft tambourine rattle as the themes returned and a troubled intensity grew with cracked whip and snare adding urgent menace, the work ending enigmatically. The orchestra’s cellos know the Gigue from Bach's Third Cello Suite and I enjoyed watching them study Müller-Schott’s lively encore.
Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony, on the face of it, tells the vivid story of the 1905 massacre of peaceful peasants petitioning the Tsar outside St Petersburg’s Winter Palace. The Tsar, sensing trouble, left the city the previous day but the soldiers turned on the people, who tried to flee, hundreds perishing. The composer’s father, who was in the crowd, managed to escape. It is a filmic sweep of a work in four movements played without pause, vividly powerful in conjuring up a series of disturbing images.
Søndergård set the scene of that January morning, the strings on a trigger hair of tension, the faint reveille muted trumpet against the ghostly soft snare adding edge to hints of restlessness in the crowd. Russian songs and a pair of flutes attempted to ease the situation, but as Søndergård brought in the soft big brass, you could almost feel the biting cold. The people became querulous, as a double clash cymbal heralded trouble ahead, Søndergård’s players now in full fury, the urgent driving strings depicting the people running from the terror. Søndergård hushed the cello and bass pizzicatos, drawing us close to the violas ‘You fell as Victim’ theme, meltingly heart-breaking after the horrors. The warning Tocsin was full of animated fury, but not before a memory of the people flashed by with a haunting cor anglais solo. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic's Forever Bells travelled to Scotland, adding authentic gravitas to the final bars, the two players throwing their arms round them in an embrace to dampen their final chime.
