Boston Classical Review

Andris Nelsons conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 Thursday night at Symphony Hall. Photo: Hilary Scott

“What do you think this music is about?” Leonard Bernstein asked the audience during a 1958 Young People’s Concert on the subject of music and meaning. He then played a snatch of the William Tell Overture.

“It isn’t about the Lone Ranger at all,” Lenny went on in reply to the kids’ vociferous—and predicted—response. “It’s about notes…Music is never about anything. Music just is.”

Perhaps he and Dmitri Shostakovich discussed as much when the two met the next year in Moscow, perhaps not. Either way, it’s hard to imagine a score that does more to vindicate Bernstein’s thesis—while, at the same time, calling it completely into question—than the Russian master’s Symphony No. 15. On Thursday night, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons took a crack at unraveling the work’s mysteries as part of the latest installment in their season-ending “Decoding Shostakovich” series.

Completed in 1971, the Fifteenth is the composer’s last entry in the genre. Written as his health deteriorated—its premiere was delayed for several months after Shostakovich suffered a heart attack—the effort is notable for its textural sparseness as well as its numerous musical quotations. The William Tell Overture’s galop turns up in the first movement. At other points, snatches of Wagner, Glinka, and nods to Shostakovich’s earlier output do, too.

Given these clear reference points, it can be challenging to not seek out extra-musical narratives. Is the first movement supposed to recall a toy shop, as Shostakovich once suggested? (He later walked that claim back.) Are the quiet percussion patterns at the end of the finale an echo of the machinery he heard in his room during a hospital stay? A time bomb? Something less sinister?

What do the long, brooding cellos solos in the second movement signify? A prophetic voice in the wilderness? A lament for life’s bitter disappointments? Or is it all just so many notes?

Nothing gives itself away easily in this music and among its interpretive challenges—more pronounced here than in some other Shostakovich symphonies—is a requirement to figure out which of this highly cryptic composer’s musical statements are expressively straightforward. Then those need to be balanced with the score’s more abstracted and ironic moments.

On Thursday, Nelsons and the BSO sought a way through the maze that offered occasional insights but didn’t quite satisfy, especially over the Fifteenth’s second half.

Despite biting woodwind runs and concertmaster Nathan Cole’s pert solos, for instance, the scherzo-like third movement’s grotesqueness felt unduly literal and earthbound. Similarly, the Allegretto episodes in the finale lacked tension.

True, the first statement of that section’s lyrical theme was pleasingly graceful. But its reprise after the harrowing climax was too slow and dragged. Also, the ticking percussion in the coda wanted for any semblance of intensity or menace; it was, rather, strangely placid and untroubled. Ironically, that coda was prefaced by an expertly paced and well-directed build-up to the movement’s screaming apex.

Nelsons and the BSO were on firmer footing in the Adagio, whose searing denouement sang with righteous fury. Also impressive were principal cellist Blaise Déjardin’s extended solos and the absorbing, edge-of-your-seat focus the orchestra’s string section brought to their quiet chorale statements near movement’s end.

The finest moments of this Fifteenth Symphony came, however, in the opening Allegretto, which was ever taut and vigorous. While its William Tell nods garnered plenty of knowing chuckles from the audience, the sophistication of Shostakovich’s compositional chops—particularly his inventive repurposing of that motto’s rhythmic and melodic strands—shined brightly, thanks to the BSO’s dry-toned, rhythmically precise delivery.

Like Shostakovich, Beethoven was often reluctant to divulge what, if anything, his music was about. In the case of the Piano Concerto No. 4, though, he conceded that its central Andante depicted Orpheus taming the Furies. On Thursday, with Mitsuko Uchida making her first Symphony Hall stand in three years, those Erinyes—as well as a braying cell phone or two—were put in their places.

Playing with warm refulgence and occasionally unhurried tempos, the Japanese-English pianist delivered a reading that was, at least in the concerto’s outer movements, a model of collaboration and partnership. Except for the Andante, there was little sense of soloist and orchestra competing with one another. Instead, a collegial songfulness prevailed in the first movement and a vigorous dancing aspect marked the concluding Rondo.

Mitsuko Uchida performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with Andris Nelsons and the BSO Thursday night. Photo: Hilary Scott

If anything, this account of the Fourth Concerto, with its attentive dynamics and tendency towards inwardness, suggested what Mozart might have written had he been granted another fifteen years. The BSO’s unapologetically modern-instrument contributions, elegant and unconflicted, leaned decidedly Classical.

They burst out with Romantic fervency at a few points, though, notably during the Rondo. Here, the music’s play of contrasts—brash and energetic refrains vs. warmly lyrical turns of phrase (its second theme uncannily anticipates the Ninth Symphony)—emerged strongly. The result was an interpretation that, at its best, reveled exuberantly in the notes for their own sake.

The program will be repeated 1:30 p.m. Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday at Symphony Hall. bso.org

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