"...a magnificent performance"

Boston Symphony Orchestra (bso.org)
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Julia Fischer, violin
Paavo Berglund, conducting

Sibelius, Violin Concerto in D minor, Opus 47 
(celebrating the 100th anniversary of the concerto's premiere)
Shostakovich, Symphony No. 8 in C minor, Opus 65

Oct. 22, 2005 performance reviewed by Karl Henning.

Art has a uniquely immediate power to erase boundaries. When looking upon a canvas of Rembrandt's, you might feel closer to a Dutchman of the seventeenth century, than to many who live and work in your own town. To see 22-year-old German violinist Julia Fischer onstage to play the Sibelius Violin Concerto, accompanied by the Boston Symphony, led by 76-year-old Finnish conductor Paavo Berglund, is to see how vital a force Music's erasure of boundaries is. Are there many other fields of human endeavor, where two people separated by 54 calendar years can combine their talents and minds so seamlessly, in real time, and to such radiant public benefit?

Fischer played the Sibelius with an assurance and musicality which belie her youth. And if here, at the outset, it is clear that she is on the Symphony Hall stage by virtue of her talent, rather than merely as a youthful curiosity, it is thrilling to contemplate the promising career on which she has but taken her first steps. Watch this violinist's smoke, ladies and gentlemen; I certainly shall.

Berglund came to Symphony as a prominent Sibelian, but it was in the Shostakovich that his impact was most powerful, and the partnership of Berglund and the BSO in the Eighth Symphony was outstanding.

The Seventh ('Leningrad') Symphony had catapulted Shostakovich to a much broader international prominence even than the Western success of The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District ten years earlier; the Seventh had been an enormous propagandic coup in the international War effort (and in describing its documentary significance thus, I would not at all seem to disparage it musically, for it is a great work). The eyes of the Proletkult were on Shostakovich for the sequel, expecting yet more music which would glorify Russian heroism in the defense against a formidable invader. But the Eighth is not a heroic work.

In Testimony, Volkov reports Shostakovich as saying, "The Seventh and Eighth are my Requiem." The reference was as much to Akhmatova's underground poem, as to any musical monument; but such a remark would have reflected upon actual last rites, as well. Oistrakh played music from the Eighth at the burial of Shostakovich's first wife, Nina. And Koussevitsky, who championed the symphony when it was new, led the BSO in the Adagio as a memorial to Franklin Roosevelt, in Philadelphia and New York, in April of 1945.

And so, where a Heroic, Victorious Symphony was what the Kremlin wanted, the Eighth is largely muted and somber; even where it is grand, it is more terrible than heroic. Furthermore, where the expectation was for a 'public monument' of a piece, Shostakovich wrote a symphony which (foreshadowing the Eighth String Quartet which he would write in Dresden 17 years later) is not merely introspective, but even a little 'autobiographical' -- something of a musical quilt, with patches which point to other works.

The fame of the Fifth Symphony is such, that a superficial similarity between, not one, but two themes in the first movements of the Fifth and the Eighth is a common observation (though the two movements themselves have very different profiles, and the themes are handled differently). But there are notable ties to the Fourth (which had not yet seen a public performance), as well.

One musician recalled Shostakovich remarking, in the wake of the Fifth's premiere, to the effect that 'Everyone says what a positive, life-affirming work it is, because it ends forte and in the major. But if it had ended piano, and in the minor, what would they be saying?' It was only after the long-delayed premiere of the Fourth Symphony (in December of 1961) that he understood Shostakovich's meaning; for the Fourth, which the composer had withdrawn while it was in rehearsal in 1936, ends piano, and in the minor.

The Fourth and Eighth Symphonies share the key of C minor, and both end softly, with the audience straining to hear the end of the last chord (which is marked morendo, 'dying away', in both scores). The ending of the Eighth, though, is an ingenious inversion of the Fourth. The Eighth must end in C major, of course; and where the sustained pedal chord in the Fourth is bottom-heavy (closed voicing in celli which are divided into four parts), the pedal with which the Eighth concludes is light and open-voiced, high in the violins.

The middle movement, which is the second of two scherzi, is dominated by an ostinato arpeggio, sort of a dark twin to the Alberti bass. Before yielding to the frenzied galop of the Trio, there is a manic hocket of paired notes, which recalls a dense passage in the third movement of the Fourth.

The fourth movement is a passacaglia, a set of variations on a repeating bass pattern: a compositional device at which Shostakovich excelled, and which looks both back to the famous intermezzo from Lady Macbeth, and forward to the First Violin Concerto and the Fifteenth Symphony. The passacaglia in the Eighth is in G# minor, but wanders alarmingly in the middle (the high note of the repeated pattern is G-natural). It is scored mostly for strings, and it demands precise intonation; the BSO strings were nothing short of rapturous. Linda Toote's piccolo was hauntingly lyrical here (as well as, more characteristically, sprightly in the trio of the second movement).

The entire orchestra acquitted itself brilliantly in a magnificent performance. The recapitulation in the first movement is nearly a concerto for English horn, and Robert Sheena played with exquisite poignancy. The unison triplets in the horns in the development (where there's no matter of 'low and high horns,' because they're all high horns) were not merely majestic, but imperial. And in the fifth movement, when the 'undeserved nonchalance' of the finale is brutally interrupted by a rapid crescendo, and a return of the dotted motto-theme so massive that it lays flat everything before it -- it was Craig Nordstrom's bass clarinet which moved brilliantly on, with beguiling agility, pretending that, really, everything is still perfectly normal.

Berglund had come slowly out onto the stage, with a cane and accompanied by an attendant. After the release of that final C major chord, and after a pause in which the audience waited while the close of the symphony 'breathed' -- for the character and quality of both the piece and its execution were such, that the rather common impulse to start clapping as soon as you recognized the piece's ending, was this once becomingly restrained -- the applause began, applause of which Maestro Berglund needed a little time to turn around to bow in acknowledgement. The applause continued as he made his gradual way back through the orchestra, and offstage. And still continued without let as he made his way back to the front to bow yet again, richly deserving that the audience honor him on their feet.