A Russian life story delineated in music
The Oakland Symphony’s concert in the Paramount Theatre on Friday, Oct. 20, served a double purpose, opening a new season and celebrating the 60th birthday of the orchestra’s longtime beloved music director, Michael Morgan. So there were good reasons on this occasion for Morgan to wax a bit retrospective.
He did it by programming Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15, the composer’s final work in the genre and — at least to hear Morgan tell it — a four-movement biography in sound.
According to the skeleton key that Morgan offered in his preperformance remarks, the Fifteenth traces a man’s life — let’s assume for the sake of argument that the man’s initials are D.S. — from childhood through maturity and into the intensive care unit of a hospital, fending off the Grim Reaper amid a panoply of noisy, buzzing machines.
That’s far from the only possible interpretation of this deeply enigmatic score, which teems with musical quotations (from Rossini, Wagner and
Shostakovich himself most recognizably) and seems intent on being even more fantastically elusive in tone than usual. But by God, it’s a plausible one, and the performance that Morgan drew from the orchestra made a notably persuasive case for his reading.
The opening movement in particular, with its jolly opening flute melody arising as if out of nowhere, displayed an innocence that a listener can rarely take at face value when dealing with Shostakovich. Usually the composer’s stretches of lightness need to be viewed with deep suspicion, but as a portrait of the simple joys of childhood, Morgan’s crisp, unapologetically buoyant rhythms brought unadulterated pleasure.
The plunge into, well, not so much darkness as complications, was delineated splendidly by principal cellist Daniel Reiter in his gleaming account of the lugubrious 12-tone melody that opens the second movement, and the sardonic, sharpedged dance that constitutes the short third movement bristled with brutal wit.
Most distinctive, perhaps, was the finale, a slow process of textural disintegration haunted throughout by the “Fate” motif from Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. There were spots here and there at which the dramatic thread threatened to snap, as if tugged at too hard by one of the Norns, but Morgan maintained control of the proceedings to bring the symphony to a spare, elegiac conclusion.
The first half of the concert was devoted to a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that served mostly as a glum reminder of how well this orchestra and conductor have collaborated on works of the standard repertoire on other occasions. Morgan chose an arrestingly fast tempo for the opening movement and brought a note of triumphant exultation to the finale. But the orchestra’s execution was often scrappy and ill tuned.