Boston Classical Review

Nothing lasts forever, as Taylor Swift reminds us, be they relationships, careers, or music festivals. So it happened that the clock ran out Saturday on both the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s “Decoding Shostakovich” fête and the ensemble’s 2024-25 Symphony Hall season.

While on paper the former looked relatively safe—several of its selections have been heard in recent years and there were no pairings of works, soloists, or composers that threatened to shake the heavens—the execution of it has been anything but dull. Indeed, the orchestra’s performances these last weeks have generally been excellent, sometimes revelatory. Saturday’s accounts of Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and Symphony No. 8 continued that trend, at least partially.

The night’s rendition of the concerto reunited BSO music director Andris Nelsons and violinist Baiba Skride, who was the soloist the last time the ensemble assayed (and recorded) the score three years ago. On the merits of Saturday’s traversal, her take on this brooding masterpiece hasn’t changed much in the interim: it remains broad, lyrical, and tends to miss the forest for the trees.

Granted, there’s room in this music to dig into its songfulness and embrace the long view. But it should never plod or lack intensity. Too often, Skride’s account did just that.

The opening Nocturne, for instance, initially offered an engaging play of contrasts, with the Latvian violinist’s bright-toned instrument floating intriguingly above the BSO’s dark-hued sonority. However, it lacked tension and momentum, phenomenons that were enhanced by the night’s broad tempos. (On this evening, Shostakovich’s metronome markings seemed to be afterthoughts: the evening’s performance lasted a good seven or eight minutes longer than the 35-minute runtime advertised in the score).

Likewise, the Passacaglia was too slow. Here, Skride’s tendency to broaden her phrases the deeper she got into the movement—as well as a periodically anemic, mid-register tone—only made the proceedings feel more diffuse. Though the Scherzo and Burlesque were livelier, both ultimately felt measured and earthbound.

As often happens in concertos, Nelsons followed the soloist; he and the orchestra were with Skride every lugubrious step of the way. The lethargic nature of much of their interpretation aside, textures were lean and the BSO’s woodwinds acquitted themselves smartly. The brash clarinet-and-violin call-and-response at the start of the finale delivered the night’s most characteristic and energizing moment.

In the Eighth Symphony, on the other hand, the BSO managed to play both spaciously—their reading came in over the 72-minute mark; the score suggests a duration of 65—and urgently.

Often considered Shostakovich’s greatest (or at least his most uncompromisingly honest) wartime symphony, its five movements eschew the bombast of the Seventh and the trite, Haydnesque whimsy of the Ninth. Instead, this is music of largely unassuaged grief, pain, sorrow, and loss.

All of that came across in the opening Adagio, whose dotted rhythms unfolded with inexorable purpose and direction. Each of its gestures—from the unsettled melody in 5/4 to the explosive climax to the movement’s shattered silences—were charged and the bewildering sweep of the music’s architecture emerged with unexpected lucidity.

While the savage fast movements felt a touch deliberate (the Allegro’s recapitulation was rounded and a bit blasé), their blend of delirious, clownish contrasts and the textural clarity of the orchestra’s playing stood out.

The night’s performance really locked in, though, for the Largo. There is, perhaps, nothing quite so desolate or chilling in any of Shostakovich’s symphonies as this movement; that the composer got its depiction of a post-apocalyptic hellscape past Soviet censors is one of music history’s great miracles. On Saturday, Nelsons and the BSO, playing with gripping intensity and a terrific dynamic focus, gave it their all.

The results were hardly comforting; there’s no solace to be found anywhere in this lament. But the spirit of resilience that lies beneath the music’s raw, disoriented aura came across quietly, potently. In a sense, this was the culmination of the past month’s festival, and, perhaps, the BSO’s decade-long focus on the composer with Nelsons: the extraordinary spiritual tenacity and fortitude of Shostakovich, the man and artist, persevering through the smoky ruins of the most harrowing circumstances imaginable was impossible to miss.

In this context, the finale’s tentative, cheeky dialogues functioned as a necessary release. The BSO’s playing was well-balanced and -directed. Though the reprise of the first movement’s blistering apex hit home, subsequent solos from bass clarinetist Andrew Sandwick, concertmaster Nathan Cole, and principal cellist Blaise Déjardin ensured that this Allegretto’s larger trajectory wasn’t derailed. The luminous coda was serene, a vision of hard-earned rest and hope.

In many regards, it is strange to applaud this brutal symphony. But Saturday’s audience obliged and, in the process, continued the season-ending custom of acknowledging the orchestra’s retirees.

There were an outsize number of them this year: Lynn Larsen, the BSO’s Vice President of Orchestra and Production; principal bass Edwin Barker and his section-mate Joseph Hearne; violist Rachel Fagerburg; and violinists Victor Romanul and Jennie Shames. Between the six of them, they’ve devoted nearly 260 years of service to the BSO. Though nothing lasts forever, their collective legacies ought to endure for a while yet.

 

Posted in Performances

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