Valery Gergiev has picked up yet another job. His new post of honorary conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Stockholm was announced at a performance of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony. No further appointment, thank goodness, was proclaimed when he conducted the same work — the loudest in Shostakovich’s porfolio — on Sunday.
If you think, in this Shostakovich year, that you’ve already heard anguish, then think again. This massive work, written under extreme political and personal pressure in 1936, didn’t bare its lacerations until the Krushchev thaw in 1961. And it stings today as it stung then. Not one of its five movements fails to turn the screw — either in relentless repetitions, in extremes of register and dynamic, or in deafening truncations and silences.
When someone like Gergiev is on the podium, momentum builds up without your even knowing it. And then the entire engine of the symphony seems to freewheel — until sound itself is battered out of existence. An orchestra like the LSO is already master of this music. And the tough tapestry of the strings in the second movement’s waltz, the parades of absurdity in the first and third, as banality collides with bravado, fall into place almost too readily. Gergiev could possibly have surprised us more. His pacing and overview of the work has a more visceral, less visionary way with it than that of, say, Rostropovich.
This concert, given in honour of the Barbican’s managing director, Sir John Tusa (birthday? anniversary?), celebrated duly and dutifully both Shostakovich and Mozart. Before the interval, Mozart’s Symphony No 36 in C, the Linz, did seem to be paying little more than lip-service. Gergiev seemed either bored or wearied by it: perhaps he was saving himself for the Shostakovich? And the LSO played as though period practice had never been heard of: hefty accenting, long and lush phrasing, and an Andante that was sluggish to the point of enervation.