Customer Reviews

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The seventh (`Leningrad') symphony is a special case in all of music, but particularly in the twentieth century. I shall take the most unusual tack possible with this piece: I will concentrate principally on the music, and on this performance. A lot of the "news around the piece" gets in the way of the piece, indeed, for may of us, absolutely determines how we hear the piece. In a way, this is only perfectly natural, given the symphony's extraordinary circumstances. But I think we may gain a better understanding of the music itself, by a certain distance from the extra-musical discussion.

The first movement is a combination of a sonata-allegro design, and a loose set of variations on a repeated theme, very deliberately modeled on Ravel's "Boléro," which interrupts the sonata-design architecture.

The opening of the movement is earnest, even something heroic, in an unfeigned manner a little unusual for Shostakovich, whose "upbeat" music often takes sharply ironic turns; there are moments when you almost think, "Copland might have written such a passage." The second theme, beginning in the strings, then with an answer in the solo oboe & woodwinds, and the string choir which follows, is light and pastoral in character. And Haitink with the LSO brings this ease and grace out of the score with effortless simplicity.

Stopping here for just a moment, it is obvious that this piece stands in marked contrast to Shostakovich's three prior symphonies. This is music entirely different to the overwhelmingly tense and strident fourth symphony, to the melancholy introspection of the fifth symphony (whose "triumphant" finale, even, raises more questions than it solves), to the restless unease of the sixth. Whatever the external circumstances of the composer's life before and during the composition of the seventh symphony, he is saying something in this music here, which is in sharp contrast to the symphonies immediately preceding.

The first movement is one of the most difficult of Shostakovich's symphonic movements to bring off, musically; and the quasi-"Boléro" march interruption is the reason. It breaks in upon the sonata design, and then, it is (deliberately, there can be no question that this is every measure what Shostakovich wanted to do here) a little wooden-headed. The tune itself is simple, folksy, even a little carefree; in this way, it is entirely unlike the sensuous, yearning, arching tune of the Ravel "model." Like the "Boléro," though, the variations are not variations in the shape or make-up of the melody, but a process of evolving orchestration. There is a sense, really, in which Shostakovich `improves' upon Ravel's example, or accomplishes something very different, at least. The accumulating texture in the Ravel is essentially just a written-out crescendo (a modesty and simplicity of aim which is probably at the heart of Ravel's tongue-in-cheek, "I have written only one masterpiece, the "Boléro"; unfortunately, it contains no music"); where in the Shostakovich, the shifting orchestration alters the character of the melody.

The propaganda of wartime publicized this repeated march as the Nazi invasion of Russia, and siege of Leningrad (the famous "900 days"); while according to Shostakovich as Solomon Volkov reports in (the admittedly controversial) "Testimony," the symphony is not about the city that Hitler sought to destroy, but about the city which Stalin had crippled, and which Hitler "merely finished off." The simplistic "programmatic" view of the first symphony, then, has been to see Stalin's boots imprinted in this interruptive march. I think both that this is a little easy, and yet that there is something in it. The tune begins in perfectly beguiling innocence (indeed, it is so unassuming a melody, that Bartok savagely parodies it in his Concerto for Orchestra) ... in which it is hard to find any illustration of Stalin at all. And even when towards the end of the tune's transformation, it is blared out in the brasses, the tune does not strike me, strictly speaking, as an evil thing, but as a simple thing turned to evil use.

The second movement, Moderato (poco allegretto), begins in something of a Beethovenian vein; there is a combination of modesty, purpose and grace in the string opening, and in the solo oboe which enters to float above the strings. This movement in particular makes this symphony stand out in contrast to almost any other of Shostakovich's symphonic works, most of which have a scherzo, an entire movement in which Shostakovich uses his gift for affective rhythmic exaggeration. Some of his scherzi rage (in the tenth), some of them thumb their nose ("Humor" in the thirteenth), some dance on the edge, so that you wonder the dancer is intoxicated, or even in his right mind (the fifth and eighth). But we don't have an entire movement of this in the seventh symphony; and we have but a taste of it here in this second movement, when the Beethovenian/Tchaikovskian grace is intruded upon by a high-wailing clarinet, itself subsequently quieted by purposeful, martial brass. And these martial brasses also furnish a contrast to Shostakovich's other symphonies: in many other symphonic moments, the brass are a brute wall of menace (third movement of the fourth, first movement of the eighth, second movement of the tenth); but here (and in a manner richly consonant with the first movement) the brass are genuinely heroic, military in a noble sense. The strings take up the clarinet's wailing theme, but even so, the urgency of the wail is reduced, and we have begun the process of returning to the opening material; the breathy flutes and the bass clarinet are yet another example of Shostakovich's brilliant use of the orchestral pallette. It is even a kind of restoration, when the clarinet returns, in its "proper character," balanced and graceful.

The chorale sections of the third movement have always been my favorite part of this symphony. Shostakovich somehow favored the clarinet in the high register; and in this chorale, he "humanizes" this timbre (in a way opposite to the "wail" of the second movement).

Shostakovitch's 7th symphony has always been a victim of it's dramatic myth and early success. Written during the siege of Leningrad in WWII and smuggled out of the city, the symphony was embraced by the Allies during the war and conducted to great acclaim by Toscanini. After the war, however, as the Cold War deepened, it was dismissed by many, even those who admired other works by the composer, as a piece of "social realist propaganda". It's a shame, because this work has greater depths than that label might suggest.

The 7th Symphony reveals it's wartime subject only in a few places, mostly in the first and second movements. Most obviously you have the famous "Theme and Variations" development, where Shostakovitch's seemingly innocuous first theme is gradually brutalized by the orchestra, leading to a shattering climax. And yet, most of the work is darker, less propaganda than lament. The third movement in particular seems gorgeously tragic.

The Haitink series with the Concertgebow is a wonderful Shostakovitch cycle, one that I aquired in it's last incarnation. Haitink is not usually a conductor that I think of as exciting, but he rises to Shostakovitch very well. (The composer seems to get the best out of a lot of mediocre conductors. Rostropovitch does Shostakovitch extremely well, even though most of the rest of his tenure with the National Symphony was unspectacular. Same holds true for Maxime Shostakovitch.) This CD would make a good choice for this wonderful symphony.

Some reviewers question whether the Shostakovich Sym. #7 is genuinely about the siege of Leningrad or a piece of pure music that fell into the lap of history. It gained its fame as a heroic war symphony and quickly lost popularity when the West stopped viewing the Soviet Union as an ally. I was excited by Leonard Bernstein's revival of the piece with the NY Phil. and then barely paid attention to it for thirty years.

But recently I went back to compare this twenty-year-old Haitink reading with the London Phil. (not the Concertgebouw--he alternated between the two orchestras for his Shostakovich cycle) and the recent Gergiev account with the Kirov Orch. on Philips. I expected Gergiev to excel on all counts, but there were surprising differences. First, the sound. Haitink is given wide-ranging, colorful sound that's fairly bright. Gergiev is given more distant, slightly cramped, duller sound. That's disappointing in the age of SACD.

As to timings, both conductors tend to pace deliberately. Haitink takes almost 29 min. in the first movement as compared to Gergiev's 27 min. What surprised me is that in the infamous jolly little march, which sounds best if taken satirically or at least with a snarl, Gergiev is carefree, setting aside any reference to invading Nazis on the march. Haitink is rather neutral; neither tries to make the music menacing or premonitory.

Haitink takes the quasi-Scherzo second movement a minute and a half faster than Gergiev, but that's enough to give his version a greater sense of urgency. At this point it would seem that Haitink will be better overall, but suddenly the woddwinds in the third movement cry out with real pain and panic under Gergiev, while Haitink is so neutral you muse about how the chords resemble Stravinsky. Just to confuse matters, Haitink's finale exhibits more fierceness in the allegro, where Gergiev seems to lose steam.

The Seventh is a problematic work, and I sympathize with any conductor who tires, as he must, to make it convincing all the way through. In this case, Haitink's version, which always seemed a bit neutral to me, is actually more exciting than Gergiev's. An unexpected result given how masterful Gergiev can be in Shostakovich's music.

For me, the Seventh is the sovereign of the Shostakovich symphonies. I am mesmerized by its starkness and grandeur. Haitink marvelously reveals these qualities, as evidenced particularly in his journey through the adagio. Listen to the purity of expression he draws from the strings, and with it, at times, an aching, flowing, singing musical line. Also, in the opening movement, with its recurring march tune theme, he conveys an impression of rock steady command, and there's the poignant evocation towards the movement's close. A quiet sense of mystery carries into the final movement, where soon things become more visceral and immediate. Throughout, Haitink stays ably committed to the music's outspokenness, with its colorful and kaleidoscopic declarations and subtleties. As the final portions unfold he projects a compelling seriousness and ultimately, with cumulative power, an intense feeling of stateliness...The London Philharmonic plays gloriously. In both interpretation and sound, this is an A-1 disc.

This is one of the most moving pieces of music I have ever heard. This recording definitely does the piece justice.

I still don't remember where I first heard this but I pull it out over and over. Would love to see it live someday.

This is the symphony made for CD. At nearly 80 minutes' worth the gaps between the movements are minimal, indeed there is none at all between the last two, but they managed it, and I detect no loss of sound quality such as used to accompany this sort of shoehorning in the LP days. The virtues of the performance are those of the others in this series that I have so far heard - big-scale, serious-minded interpretations, sensitivity to the mood-swings that are so characteristic of this composer, and impeccable orchestral work.

Probably no purely instrumental symphony by Shostakovich has given rise to so much extra-musical comment, but to my mind it can all be dispensed with. I am not troubled, or even visited, by thoughts of heroic workers, the sufferings of the people of Leningrad or the composer's uneasy relationship with the authorities when I hear it. And while it is certainly not unalloyed `absolute' music in the sense that Brahms's symphonies are that, the extent of the extra-musical expression imposed on it by its creator is not much more than one normally finds in Beethoven. The influence of Mahler on this work seems to me to be strong, not least on its expansiveness. The adagio alone is as long as many a Haydn symphony, and the first movement takes as long as Beethoven usually takes over all four, so music-lovers new to the work are counselled to listen in a more Mahler-oriented frame of receptivity. The resemblance to Mahler extends, in this symphony, even to the tone of voice that this chameleon among 20th century composers elects to adopt for the occasion, and it comes through most strongly and consistently, for me, in the slow movement.

If the first movement does not give you some problems I can only say it ought to. An enormous amount of the movement is taken up with a long series of repetitions of a single phrase with the orchestration building up over a long crescendo in a manner recalling Ravel's Bolero, a resemblance that cannot conceivably be accidental. I maintain, in the face of any orthodoxy to the contrary, that this sequence has absolutely no musical merit whatsoever. The theme itself is trivial and ridiculous, justly parodied by Bartok in the intermezzo interotto of the concerto for orchestra; and while Shostakovich is a thorough master of orchestral sound, I can't hear him as an absolute wizard in that department in the sense that Ravel is, or, come to that, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky, Strauss, Elgar or Walton.

Understandably enough, this symphony, written in 1941, was pressed into service with the patriotic spin-machine. The composer himself wrote a lengthy and dutiful commentary in furtherance of the its role as an ideological statement. However when the pressure came off he let out that he had planned it before the war. Depending on how you wish to take this intermediate version, it may in some sense be expressing anguish at the treatment of Leningrad by his own government. However there is a further twist, and there appears also to be some connexion with the Psalms. One approach to this music is to root deeply into these counter-indicative clues. The one I prefer is to ignore them altogether. Much (not all) of the first movement notwithstanding, this is music of major significance, intelligible and imposing without external references.

Michael Jones' Leningrad: A State of Siege, which was just published and draws, in part, on recently "released" documents, refers to Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony a number of times. I quote from the INTRODUCTION:

It was not merely the Red Army that saved Leningrad from utter ruin. This book will tell the story of this city's survival, and what made that possible -- how the people of Leningrad found the resources within themselves to endure and to survive...The greatest symbol of this defiance was an extraordinary orchestral concert. On 9 August 1942 the besieged city put on a performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony....The symbolic importance of this concert was enormous...The Germans had boasted that they would capture the city on 9 August and hold a victory celebration at Leningrad's Astoria Hotel. The date for the Seventh Symphony's premiere was thus deliberately chosen...Many years after the war [the conductor] was approached by a group of German tourists, who said that they had come to the city especially to see him. They had been in the besieging army outside the city, so close that they were able to intercept Leningrad's radio signals, and hear the broadcast of Shostakovich's Seventh. Now these veterans said: "It had a slow but powerful effect on us. The realisation began to dawn that we would never take Leningrad."

Jones' book is VERY good. I can't wait to finish it. Then I am going to listen to the 7th again though in crucial respects I will be truly hearing it for the first time.