Kurt Masur conducts BSO in Shostakovich and Bruckner

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Tuesday, 19 April
Kurt Masur, conducting
Vadim Repin, violin

Shostakovich, Violin Concerto No. 1, Opus 77
Bruckner, Symphony No. 4 in E-flat, Romantic

April 19, 2005 performance reviewed by Karl Henning.

Shostakovich composed two piano concerti as performance vehicles for his son, Maksim; they are comparatively light, extroverted pieces - a description of their character only, and not a value judgment (for there goes abroad a tendency to dismiss music which is light rather than dramatic).

Without denigrating them, if we set the piano concerti aside as a special case, then the solo concerto is that major genre to which Shostakovich made a significant contribution, but which he approached latest. His first symphony was his graduation piece from the Conservatory; two of his noteworthy early successes were in opera (The Nose, and Ledi Makbet); though he went on to write 15 of them, he did not write his first string quartet until he was 32, but this was still before the war (1938). It was not until 1947, though, that Shostakovich began to write a violin concerto; and as it turned out, he was finishing the concerto at the very time that the First Congress of the Composers’ Union decreed that his music was grievously flawed by Formalism (an ism which could be made to mean almost anything, musically).

Shostakovich was first singled out for public censure in 1936, for Ledi Makbet; at that time, his Symphony No. 4 was in rehearsal, but he withdrew it, prudently recking that this sprawling titan of a symphony stood no realistic chance of official approval. Now, in 1948, Shostakovich quietly completed his Violin Concerto, and kept it in a drawer for eight years. He was right to keep the Concerto in reserve until a more favorable hour.

Even the Symphony No. 5, which was welcomed in 1937 as a sign of Shostakovich’s musical redemption, had been criticized for its passages of solemnity and reflection. In 1948, neither the spare ambiguity of the Nocturne which opens the Violin Concerto No. 1, nor the Passacaglia of the third movement, a series of intense variations of a sometimes stern, sometimes terrified character, would have met any official tolerance.

The Ukrainian violinist David Oistrakh, who is historically bound to both the Prokofiev and Shostakovich concerti, gave legendary accounts of the Shostakovich Opus 77. In our day, Vadim Repin plays the Concerto with a searing vitality; Tuesday’s performance was simply fascinating. The BSO under Masur’s direction kept up with Repin in all the breakneck rapidity of the Scherzo; and at the conclusion of the dizzying galop of the Burlesque, the power and command of the presentation lifted practically the entire audience to their feet, in what is the most richly deserved ovation I have witnessed at Symphony Hall this season.