New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Philharmonia to play the jolting ‘Year 1905’
There’s a couple of horrific events memorialized in Yale Philharmonia’s featured piece of classical music on Friday in Woolsey Hall. Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103” tips off its story in the subtitle: “The Year 1905.”
That was the year of “Bloody Sunday,” when unarmed Russian demonstrators were massacred by the czar’s soldiers, leading eventually to the Russian revolution. The 1957 symphony is also a musical comment on the 1956 massacre in Budapest, Hungary.
We asked principal conductor Peter Oundjian how such a dramatic story can be told without lyrics and how a casual listener would know what the symphony is really about.
“I usually set it up with about a two-minute speech,” he said, noting there may be a lighting variation employed to set the scene at the onset.
Generally, said Oundjian, symphonies do tell a story (as do the nebulous “tone poems”). Gustav Mahler once notated narrative elements in programs, but stopped that — “in some ways a big mistake because he’s assuming a good deal of sophistication on the part of listeners.”
Not that you should talk down to patrons, but Oundjian is for clarity. He said he remembers going
to the Whitney Museum years ago and looking at contemporary art. “And it was like, ‘Wow, I have no idea what I’m looking at.’ And then I saw a group that had a lecturer (and I) listened to every word she said. And it was fascinating!”
Few explain a classical work quite like the accomplished and enthusiastic Oundjian. We confessed we couldn’t recognize when one movement in the Shostakovich symphony ended and another began.
“It’s a very intense narrative that never lets up,” Oundjian said. “It’s one of the most dramatic pieces of music that I think has ever been created... so moving and so exciting, as well.”
The piece’s four movements represent different elements of an historic event: the slow, ominous start signaling the thousands of desperate, starving folks arriving in St. Petersburg to plead and protest.
“There are all sorts of folk songs you hear ... softly but you also hear the distant fanfares, which are very eerie and threatening — one for the trumpet and one for the horn.
“The second movement is basically the massacre itself, when they open fire ... on this crowd,” the maestro said. “When this massacre scene ends, it ends with complete abruptness. And then you hear the music from the very beginning that represented the people, but now it is very eerie because it has trills on it. So he (Shostakovich) has transformed it ... and he’s also changed any optimistic note that existed ... flattened to be a tragic, pessimistic note.”
The third movement is
using low pizzicato on the cellos and double basses to create an eerie atmosphere, said Oundjian. The final movement, an alarm bell, is powerful and affirmative.
“It’s about defiance and vigilance,” said Oundjian. “Just before the end, there’s a really tragic solo on the English horn, that, oh my God, is so moving.”
It ends with a reprise of themes, “which gives phenomenal strength and power to the majesty of the people themselves. So, it’s incredible.”
And yet, this varied piece is seldom performed. Is that because it’s not smooth and comfy?
“I don’t know. I think people from all generations have been fans of pretty intense music, whether you go back to Deep Purple (he chuckles) or... You know, Pink Floyd wasn’t exactly good-time music either.”
Oundjian said he doesn’t understand why No. 11 is not played more live. “(For) a first-time concert-goer to an orchestra, I think this would be among the very best choices. It’s like a phenomenal film score, and you see everything in your own imagination.”
Canadian-born Oundjian previously played with the Tokyo String Quartet and conducted the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for 14 years, enjoying a touching send-off in June 2018. While he conducts classical pieces, he’s not a strict traditionalist.
“Of course we’re playing for the people who love classical music, but the people we also really care about are the people who aren’t so sure,” he said in reference to including a lighting effect or other theatrical touch in a performance.
The first half of the concert will be another historic piece, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21. It’s something of a comingout party for young Beethoven, showing influences of the great Haydn and Mozart but signaling there was a new superstar composer.
The work “is more a narrative of feelings, of human experiences, which we can all relate to . ... There’s a tremendous amount of playfulness in the first symphony; it’s one of the more optimistic pieces” — as a counterpoint to the heavy Shostakovich work.
Beethoven starts it unconventionally, with a quizzical chord. “He’s already saying, in his very first symphony, ‘I’m Beethoven; I have some new ideas here.’ ... The ‘1st Symphony’ is an absolute masterpiece; it’s a joy to play and to listen to.”
As for seeing and hearing the uber-talented Yale grad students play in the Philharmonia, Oundjian said, “I think there’s nothing quite as thrilling — in a very different way from hearing an established, world-class, famous orchestra — but in some ways it’s more thrilling because they play so exceptionally well. They’re so sophisticated now.”