Last weekend's New York Philharmonic’s concert opened with a fanfare that’s a month over 70 years old. Shostakovich’s Festive Overture was composed to order in about an hour, so legend goes, in the early years of the post-Stalin era. It was a riotous, seven-minute start to a dramatic concert with Keri-Lynn Wilson (in her NY Phil debut) leading in swooping gestures and bouncing blonde ponytail, good fun and bright as the sun. That celebratory feeling wouldn’t last.
Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto followed with soloist Frank Huang. The wonder in the performance came in the execution of abrupt tempo shifts and changes even in mass and density, all done with precision. Huang was never lost in the shifting tides but sang above them. Composed in 1935 as Prokofiev prepared to return to the Soviet Union, the work struck as a piece struggling to find something to say, right up to the dance in the third movement. It’s stronger in orchestration than thematic statement and Wilson leaned into that, giving it clarity and distinction.
The main event came after the interval: a screening of William Kentridge’s 2022 Oh to Believe in Another World, created with Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony as its score and played live by the NY Phil for this three-night run. The film was commissioned by the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, which gave the premiere and also featured in an installation realization with five-channel audio.
Shostakovich, of course, had a long and complicated relationship with the Soviet regime. He began work on his Tenth just after his 48th birthday and in the months immediately following Stalin’s death, not long after he completed the Festive Overture. The symphony is a massive and aptly complicated work, running nearly an hour in four movements. Kentridge’s film adds even more contextual layers with stop-motion paper dolls of Stalin, Lenin and Shostakovich himself intercut with vintage film and title-card sloganeering. It’s more a foreboding film than a narrative one; photos of soldiers with their faces scribbled over and schoolboys with numbers written over their heads, for example, provide abstract messaging with clear emotive force.
The symphony functions as both a diegetic and an incidental score, but is far too rich to be either. Paper doll Shostakovich appeared on the screen above the orchestra with limbs of differing lengths and a red flag for a baton, conducting the real players in herky-jerky movements. Elsewhere, lamps and tools dance in tutus. It’s all cleverly conniving; Kentridge dares us to laugh at the comical figures – Shostakovich at times sprouts an oversized, Mickey Mouse hand – while confronting us with a toy-box of tyranny. With the orchestra resounding, the intermedia brilliance was dizzying.
Wilson’s painstaking attention to detail more than paid off. Nothing was out of place, nothing (it seemed) could be any way other than as it was. She led with an assuredness that was apparent, on point and didn’t leave fingerprints. Sitting in the audience was exhausting. It was terrifying, and made me at times want to leave the theatre before the conclusion in the vain hope that things were going better outside.
