Heavyweight Shostakovich from Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic

Another Friday evening, another Shostakovich symphony at the Barbican. After the BBC Symphony’s scorching Tenth under Elim Chan last weekend, along comes the Fifth, courtesy of starry international guests the Czech Philharmonic and Semyon Bychkov on the latest leg of a European mini-tour (Paris and Bruges to come). Sheku Kanneh-Mason came along for the ride, the ferocious rollercoaster that is the First Cello Concerto.

The Czech Phil has a real affinity for this music. There’s something about the orchestra’s slavic sound – dark strings, oily woodwinds, rasping brass – that has suited these scores since the 1950s, going back to the artistic directorship of Karel Ančerl. It helps that they have a current Chief Conductor whose Shostakovich pedigree is impeccable. Before he left the Soviet Union fifty years ago, the year Shostakovich died, Bychkov had been a student of lIya Musin (a friend of the composer) at the Leningrad Conservatory and served as an assistant to the legendary Yevgeny Mravinsky, who conducted many Shostakovich premieres, including both works on this programme.

It was with the First Cello Concerto that Kanneh-Mason won the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2016, a work that also featured on his debut album when Decca snapped him up. What a difference the intervening years have made. He now has much more to say. With a sinewy tone, Kanneh-Mason played with tremendous intensity, pedal to the metal in the first movement’s abrasive moments. Led by whipcrack timpani and pungent woodwinds, the orchestra responded with urgency.

Even during his softest playing, Kanneh-Mason maintained the focus in the Moderato movement, encompassing a wide dynamic and emotional range in the long cadenza that followed before the finale's grim dance, dispatched with gritted teeth and muscular determination before the orchestra abruptly shut down proceedings.

In that finale, Shostakovich thumbs his nose at Stalin by parodying his favourite song, Suliko. That was easy enough to do in 1959, six years after the dictator’s death. During his lifetime, Stalin posed an existential threat to Shostakovich, beginning with the 1935 condemnation in Pravda of his successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. It forced the composer to shelve his Fourth Symphony, writing instead “a Soviet artist’s practical, creative reply to just criticism” in his Fifth.

On the surface, it’s a conventional enough symphony to have pleased the Soviet authorities, darkness to light, ending in triumph. But that ending, the strings playing their unremitting A quavers – 252 of them – surely signals forced rejoicing, a hollow, tub-thumping victory. It certainly felt that way under Bychkov’s baton, deliberate, mechanical, defiant.

The performance was heavyweight and dark, Bychkov typically unshowy. With a long, flowing beat he guided the orchestra wisely, managing the transitions between sections fluidly. The industrial strength Czech brass provided the necessary menace but it was their rich, velvety strings that impressed in the Largo, a deeply slavic sound.

You don’t readily associate Bychkov with rushes of adrenalin, but the finale set off at a cracking pace, full of purpose. One almost – almost – wished he’d gone on to ‘do a Lenny’ and take the closing pages at Bernstein’s doubling of the speed. But that would be to turn the coda into a genuine victory. Shostakovich is more ambiguous than that.