You’d have to be a strange kind of human being not to smell death in Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony. Icy, spooky and deeply unsettling orchestral sounds at the outset give way to the harrowing first words of the all-male chorus, followed by the bass soloist. Immediately before starting work on this symphony, Shostakovich had completed his orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. He later commented that the majority of his symphonies were tombstones. Since the banning of his only opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, in 1936 (it was relaunched as Katerina Ismailova in 1962), he had not toyed with any other operatic ambitions.This work saw his return to something approaching that mode.
Shostakovich’s Babi Yar symphony was surrounded by all kinds of difficulties when it was premiered in December 1962. Mravinsky had already declined to conduct; pressure was put on Kondrashin to do the same. Bass soloists became mysteriously indisposed. The words of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar were not printed in the programme book and subsequently the poet felt forced to redact parts of the original text. Pravda on the day after the premiere reported the event in a single sentence. Very quickly the entire work was banned and the score had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union by Rostropovich so it could be played in the West.
Why did this symphony elicit such a strong response from the authorities? It was the all too explicit condemnation of anti-Semitism throughout Russian territories (and elsewhere too), and the suggestion that in September 1941 Russian and Ukrainian collaborators helped the Nazis to murder some 34,000 Jewish men, women and children at a ravine near Kyiv called Babi Yar. Some 100,000 residents of the city, including many other ethnic groups deemed to be “sub-human”, later perished there during the course of World War II.
This five-movement work, each of which features a poem by Yevtushenko and lasting just over an hour, was at the heart of this concert given by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, and conducted by Andrey Boreyko. It benefited enormously from the presence of the Russian-trained Alexander Roslavets. From his first entry the voice seemed to open up an abyss of its own: deep as a cavern, coated in tar, malevolent where required, always sensitive to the inflections of the text, projecting with a natural authority into the auditorium far and wide. His narrative line was utterly compelling, with subtle variations in tone and emphasis, such as the lightening of the vocal texture in the opening movement’s “I feel that I am Anne Frank, as tender as a shoot in April”, or the sinuously comic touches in the concluding movement entitled A Career with its references to the iconoclastic Galileo. His careful articulation of the very last words (“I’ll follow my career in such a way that I’m not following it!”) was powerful and chilling.
The 41 choristers of the London Philharmonic Choir (one more than the minimum stipulated by the composer) produced a compact body of sound with degrees of robust intensity. However, it was too much to ask them to match the Slavic fervour of Roslavets’s bass or to ring out convincingly above the full pelt of orchestral forces. For that reason their hushed whispers in the fourth movement Fears (“here and there they still beg for bread”) and the ensuing sotto voce passages made more of an emotional impact.
The LPO under the energising direction of Andrey Boreyko played quite beautifully at times, especially the resonant lower strings. It was almost too beautiful. There is a uniqueness to Shostakovich’s sonorities which commands attention: the desolation conjured up in the third movement In the Store with a tapping rhythm on castanets and wood blocks, the extended tuba solo at the start of Fears and the later col legno passage for strings, the unaccompanied bass clarinet in A Career and the intimacy created at its close by use of solo violin and viola. But though the climaxes erupted with visceral force, there wasn’t always sufficient savagery. The orchestral rhythms in the opening Babi Yar movement could have been even snappier, the suggestion of jackboots in the following Humour movement coated in even greater sarcasm. There is one important structural detail throughout the entire work: the tolling of a bell that has echoes of a requiem-like atmosphere. Here a chance was missed. A real bell rather than the tubular variety would have yielded additional amplitude.
This intelligently devised programme began with Schoenberg’s short cantata, A Survivor from Warsaw. It set the scene for the evening’s exploration of inhumanity, chronicling as it does the rounding-up of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto before their transport to the gas chambers. From the icy opening trumpet fanfare to the angular and jarring sounds that follow, it is a vivid evocation of terror. It might almost have been the soundtrack to a horror movie. Roslavets in the role of narrator delivered the English text with added pungency conveyed through the employment of amplification, his chilling shouts in German of “Abzählen!” (“Number off!”) punctuating the air and creating an overwhelming sense of oppression. Schoenberg’s use of Sprechstimme for the narration is a supreme example of how the human voice is denied its warmth and reduced to a raw matter-of-factness. And then with quiet determination the choristers intoned the words of Schema Israel, the Jewish profession of faith drawn from Deuteronomy.
A memorable link to the events in the Ghetto came in the evening’s concerto. Mieczysław Weinberg escaped the Holocaust; his immediate family did not. His violin concerto in G minor, premiered by its dedicatee, Leonid Kogan, in 1959, has long been championed by Gidon Kremer. It is part of a renaissance of Weinberg’s music, prompted no doubt by the close association with his friend Shostakovich. This work is as far removed from the traditional idea of a Romantic fiddle concerto as you are likely to get. Over the course of its four movements the music is often disturbing and dislocating. Kremer’s dark and husky tone, far from ingratiating, highlighted the rasping qualities of the opening Allegro molto with its motoric energy, and he played up the skittish elements of the concluding Allegro risoluto. It was difficult to overlook the moments of unsteady bowing and wavering intonation in the Adagio, the deep heart of this concerto, but there was a quiet dignity to Kremer’s playing. No outcry of pain but profound sadness: everything sounded muted even when it wasn’t.
What can one take from an evening encompassed in so much gloom? If the human spirit means anything at all, it is the power of defiance, the refusal to let the bastards grind you down. Shostakovich himself best embodied this when he declared, “When a man is in despair, it means he still believes in something.”
Alexander Hall
Schoenberg – A Survivor from Warsaw; Weinberg –Violin Concerto in G minor, Opus 67; Shostakovich – Symphony No.13 in B flat minor (Babi Yar)
Alexander Roslavets (narrator/bass); Gidon Kremer (violin); London Philharmonic Choir, Artistic Director Neville Creed; London Philharmonic Orchestra; Andrey Boreyko – conductor
Royal Festival Hall, London, 27 November 2024
Top image: Alexander Roslavets © InArt Management
Additional image: Gidon Kremer © Angie Kremer