Recording of the Month
Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony are on a roll, with a solid gold series that just keeps on delivering, says David Nice
Shostakovich
Symphonies Nos 6 & 7
‘Andris Nelsons’s interpretation pulls it all off with an alternation of tense atmosphere with electrifying release’
Shostakovich
Symphony No. 6 in B minor; Suite from the incidental music to ‘King Lear’; Festive Overture; Symphony No. 7 in C major (Leningrad) Boston Symphony Orchestra/ Andris Nelsons
DG 483 6728 131.62 mins (2 discs)
Objectively speaking, the symphonies in Andris Nelsons’s fourth Boston Symphony Shostakovich instalment are a masterpiece (the Sixth) and a curate’s – or rather a commissar’s – egg (the Seventh). Yet this interpretation of the Leningrad pulls it all off with hyper-sophisticated playing and an alternation of tense atmosphere with electrifying release, the kind you usually only get in a live performance. And so these are, but with such a silent audience that some patching must have been inevitable. It never shows. Nelsons wins such beautiful phrasing, both collectively and individually, from his Boston players in the Seventh’s Adagio and offers such long-term vision of both the fastish and the slow crescendos that make up the outer portions of its finale that you never question the quality of the material.
It’s first rate, of course, in the first two movements, and when not, deliberately banal
(the so-called ‘invasion’ theme that Bartók nose-thumbed in his Concerto for Orchestra). There’s a heightened sense of dread as Nelsons slows down after the opening gambit and colour drains out of the exposition before the side-drum insidiously taps its first tattoo. The build is coiled, lethal; and how much better we can understand that juggernaut of tyranny – Stalin’s or Hitler’s, or both, it hardly matters now
Nelsons wins such beautiful phrasing from his Boston players in the Seventh
– as the triumph of banality from jokey beginnings to overwhelming evil, even if in Europe we’re not quite at the zenith yet. You realise in the crazy era of Putin, Trump and Brexit that the composer could never be too outlandish; parody becomes truth.
We feel the inward pain, too. Peerless Boston first flute, piccolo and oboe – caught in especially rich sheen by a recording that makes the most of shrill and bass-heavy frequencies – bring phrasing of painstaking care to second-rank ideas, linking them to the finer etching of the more personal loneliness in the Sixth’s great Largo. This holds comparison with the searing performance on the debut disc of the
Estonian Festival Orchestra under Paavo Jarvi, another army of generals. Though Nelsons is careful with articulation in the scherzo and galop that follow unequivocal tragedy, the end result is still exciting. It might have made more sense to connect the piccolo solo here with the one in Shostakovich’s late film music for Kozintsev’s genius film of King Lear; instead we get his less momentous 1941 score for a stage play by the same director. In place of the bare late style for the film, we get Mahlerian echoes and one titanic climax, for the blinding of Gloucester (though it does seem odd to end on a jaunty march). The subtitle of three issues in the Boston series so far, the ubiquitous ‘Under Stalin’s Shadow’, doesn’t quite hold true for the jolly romps of the Festive Overture – inception 1947, completion 1954, by which time, a year after Stalin’s death, there was something to celebrate. This is a pure professional occasion piece, the Sixth’s finale minus fangs, but it’s still dazzling with Boston’s brass rampart. Magnificent stuff.
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★