★★★☆☆
Suppressed during the second period of Shostakovich’s life when he was classed as a dangerous “formalist”, the Violin Concerto No 1 is a plea for personal freedom. There is testimony from this time in Shostakovich’s life where a panel of apparatchik composers ask the bewildered man how his latest pieces — inoffensive studies of Bach — support the party line. He has no answer in words.
It was Bach’s spirit that cleaved to James Ehnes’s stirring performance of this herculean piece with the London Symphony Orchestra. Ehnes approached the opening movement, which Shostakovich called a nocturne, as if in a trance, with song-like phrasing and pure, noble tone. The going gets rougher than that. Shostakovich plunges his soloist into a nightmarish scherzo, an anguished cadenza and a concluding “burlesque” that threaten utter chaos. Ehnes rode the rollercoaster with endurance and elegance, the central defiant message spelt out in the flickering of Shostakovich’s personal four-note motto: I’ve survived this far, I will survive again.
In the eye of the storm there were moments when Ehnes could have supplied some more sweat, more grit. And the orchestra, conducted by Fabien Gabel, rarely seemed to get properly stuck in. Yet Ehnes’s sensitivity (and his Bach encore — what else?) was the highlight of a concert where Gabel was pushing the throttle, but in the process rather throttling the life out of Ravel’s La Valse and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (in the Ravel orchestration). While the disintegrating Valse hints at First World War carnage, here the waltzers sounded as if they were already knee-deep in Verdun mud. There was some stylish playing in the Mussorgsky, but also frenetic speeds, overloud climaxes and a Bydlo (the rumbling ox-cart) that suffered almost total malfunction.
Plopped into this Russian-French programme also came the premiere of Michael Taplin’s Ebbing Tides, a commission from the LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme. Supplying unstable pulses of sound that lull you into a false sense of security, it’s a moody and colouristic piece that made skilful use of its deluxe forces.