Fiction-laden history, musical truth: Ashkenazy brings Shostakovich to Battleship Potemkin

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but in the hands of a skilful propagandist, fiction can be more compelling than truth – a fact that has been painfully obvious over the last 18 months. One of the most skilful propagandists of all time was the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, whose Battleship Potemkin was screened at the Royal Festival Hall last night, accompanied by a full-sized Philharmonia playing extracts from Shostakovich symphonies, selected and conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy. It was an evening to make one muse on history, film-making and music, all rolled together into a single experience.

We are in October 2017, 100 years to the month after the Russian Revolution, but those events were prefigured by the “Revolution of 1905”, a series of episodes of unrest which, one can argue, were the turning point in signalling the end of absolute Tsarist rule. One of those episodes was the mutiny on the Potemkin, triggered by a row over rotten meat in a background of deep malaise in the Russian fleet after its catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese. Eisenstein’s film is based on true fundamentals: the Potemkin’s second-in-command Giliarovsky did threaten to shoot crew members for refusing to eat maggot-infested meat, he did order a tarpaulin to be spread over them so as not to spatter the deck with blood, Giliarovsky did shoot the mutiny’s leader Vakulinchuk before being killed himself, the Potemkin did sail unharmed through the Russian squadron sent to intercept it. Nonetheless, Eisenstein plays fast and loose with the details: there are no strong grounds to believe that “solidarity with the workers” played any part in the mutiny, and the most famous sequence in the movie, the massacre on the Odessa Steps, did not actually happen.

But it might as well have done, such is the power of the film-making. The line of Tsarist soldiers marching down the steps, rifles at the ready, is not easily forgotten, nor is the baby in its pram, careering down those same steps once its mother has been shot. But it’s the details that impress: the camera focuses not on the soldiers’ rifles but on their boots, not on the crying baby but on the wheels of the pram. As in the greatest horror movies, Eisenstein allows the viewer to fill in the details far more graphically than any direct representation could ever achieve. A plethora of the shot choices and camera angles stick in the memory: the upwards shot through the grille of the deck, the swaying of the tables suspended from the mess ceiling, the close-ups of maggot-infested meat, Vakulinchuk’s dying body swinging in the rigging, the shots of the ship’s machinery, the strange character of the priest with his cross that ends up embedded, axe-like, in the deck, the phenomenal crowd scenes as the people of Odessa gather – I could name a dozen others. The dialogue frames in Battleship Potemkin may be cheesy, but as a piece of sustained visual onslaught, few movies have equalled it – even 80 years after its creation and with all the technical wizardry that has appeared in the interim.

But virtuosic as it is, the movie redoubles in power when matched as intelligently to Shostakovich’s music as Ashkenazy achieved. Wisely, Ashkenazy and arranger Frank Strobel did not attempt to synchronise individual bars of music with every individual movement on the screen, other than the occasional alignment of a trumpet solo with an on-screen fanfare and various climaxes timed to the end of a sequence. Rather, Strobel gave us chunks from five of the symphonies, chosen to match the film action in mood. Appropriately, the Symphony no. 11 (subtitled “The Year 1905”) featured prominently: it turns out that the calm of early morning snow on St Peterburg’s Palace Square translates surprisingly well to early morning calm on the Black Sea, while the distant trumpet and military stirrings work just as well. The Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony was played more or less in full in the episode where a flotilla of small boats converges on the Potemkin as the supportive people of Odessa resupply the mutineers with a comical variety of livestock.  

Ashkenazy looked in fine form, sprightly to the point of a Tiggerish bounciness quite astonishing for an octogenarian, and the Philharmonia produced some fine playing. In the cinema environment, it’s hard to concentrate on the finer points of symphonic playing, so it’s the extremes of dynamic range that one notices: some bone-shuddering climaxes, helped out by good precision from the large percussion section, the delicate calm of high strings with the occasional quote from the harps, or rapid fire playing from cellos and basses to create threat. My overall sense was of slightly greater urgency than one would hear in a normal concert performance, which gelled quite well with the cinematic experience.

While we’re all familiar with the horrors of the Soviet Union, it’s as well to remember that the Tsarist regime which preceded it – ridden with corruption and content to drive its peasants to starvation in the interests of clinging to the established order – was untenably dreadful. While a strong pinch of historical salt was required, the virtuosity of Eisenstein, Shostakovich and Ashkenazy provided an excellent reminder.

[Update: the initial version of this review failed to mention Frank Strobel as having selected and arranged the music. My apologies to him, and thanks to Ben Palmer for pointing this out.]