Musical crimes must be ranked very low on the list of atrocities that Stalin inflicted on his own people. Nevertheless, one minor tragedy of the grim 1930s in the Soviet Union was that Stalin terrified his greatest composer so much that Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Symphony before its premiere. Thus was his public deprived of the chance to hear the masterpiece that, we now know, precisely echoes the terror, brutality and hopelessness of that age.
Afterwards, a shaken Shostakovich would learn to cloak his feelings in irony and smokescreens. But in the Fourth — in passages such as the hair-raising string fugue, the abrasive, punch-drunk brass writing, the Mahlerian funeral march and the bittersweet waltz snatches — the message is still raw and unambiguous, the language unruly and uninhibited.
With its vast instrumentation and big demands on cohesion, emotional commitment and stamina, the work is also a beast of a challenge for any orchestra. Under Vladimir Jurowski’s cogent direction, the London Philharmonic was certainly energised, and much of the playing was spirited. What it lacked was razor-sharp precision and soloistic flair from the woodwind principals. This isn’t quite yet a band that flies to the virtuoso heights that its principal conductor’s pungent interpretations ideally require.
In a typically clever piece of Jurowski programming the concert opened with the Five Fragments that Shostakovich sketched as a preparatory exercise before embarking on the Fourth Symphony. Some warm-up! They are bleak, dissonant and wilfully perverse in their scoring.
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Moving from this to the shimmering Impressionism, Straussian opulence and sumptuous lyricism of Szymanowski’s 1916 First Violin Concerto was like sinking into a warm bath after being out in numbing cold. Or it should have been. But the soloist, Carolin Widmann, didn’t muster the tonal warmth or power to champion this rarely-heard piece effectively. And under pressure her intonation tended to waver. A pity, because Szymanowski needs, and deserves, more champions.