Chicago Symphony Orchestra
The biggest risk was the choice of composer. Shostakovich, unlike Debussy or Stravinsky, doesn’t have a nice, staid, settled reputation. It’s been 25 years since his death, and his career and his music are still the subject of rancorous debate. One of the biggest pleasures of the festival was to see so many first-class musicians participating just because they were Shostakovich fans. It was an even bigger pleasure to see the house so full at each concert and the audience so wildly enthusiastic. I don’t suppose they’d turn out like this if the CSO offered three weeks of John Cage, but who would have thought they’d be there for an intransigent freak like Shostakovich?
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And how did the music itself come off? The peaks were extraordinary–Shostakovich’s best music is as good as any written in this century. But it’s a long way down to the valleys. Two of the concert programs were largely taken up with Shostakovich at his worst, and I found those evenings excruciating. Granted, hearing so many concerts in a row is a prescription for critical overload: Shostakovich’s minor flaws and stylistic tics can get irritating after one concert, but by the last they’d swelled into leviathans of annoyance. I got particularly tired of his fondness for the shock tactic of breaking up reflective passages with fortissimo blasts. But cumulatively the worst problem was his characteristic tone, which is so unrelentingly dark and cryptic it makes the most aggressive modern music seem sunny. After enduring the final, shattering crescendo of horror on the concluding program I couldn’t wait to go home and listen to Frank Sinatra.
The festival offered an unusual opportunity to find out what he thought he was doing because it represented his own choices: In the early 1960s Rostropovich had asked him what he’d like to see included in an ideal retrospective, and he’d worked out the programs for these six concerts. Unfortunately he wasn’t easily tricked into self-disclosure. He had a big catalog to pick from–he was a fast and prolific composer–but he stuck mostly to the same shortlist of masterpieces any of his fans would have come up with. The Fifth and Tenth symphonies, the Violin Concerto, and the Cello Concerto are all exceptional works, and I was glad for the chance to hear them again. But they aren’t exactly full of revelations.
So how are they supposed to be performed? Rostropovich made an interesting choice: he did them all straight. He ignored the pervasive irony and the bursts of self-parody and went consistently for clarity, balance, and maximum force. This was brilliantly effective, though it did have some curious consequences, such as turning the worst of the bunch, the 12th, into a rousing orchestral showpiece, a real foot-stomping crowd pleaser. I don’t think anybody in the hall was focusing on what the music was supposed to be about–after all, the ideology of the Russian Revolution seems to be as much of a dead issue these days as the wars of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. Even so, the sight of the bejeweled CSO crowd cheering a tribute to Lenin was unforgettable.
Not that this settles anything about Shostakovich. The quartets as a whole are also so inward and peculiar they’re often simply incomprehensible. They seem like a sustained confrontation with what Sir Thomas Browne once called “the dark tribunal of the heart,” but they provide no verdicts and keep opening into further recesses of doubt. Their real message may be that Shostakovich himself didn’t know the answers to his own riddles–perhaps the surface puzzlements of his music are only camouflage for an unfathomable mystery. This isn’t the conclusion I expected to bring away from the festival, but I’ll take it. Before, Shostakovich’s work had seemed one of the harshest, least hospitable byways of classical music. By the end, it had become as strange and tantalizing as Atlantis.
