United Kingdom Beethoven, Shostakovich: Jonathan Biss (piano), James Platt (bass), BBC National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales / Ryan Bancroft (conductor). Hoddinott Hall, Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 11.2.2024. (PCG)
Beethoven – Piano Concerto No.1 in C, Op.15
Shostakovich – Symphony No.13 in B-flat minor, Op.113
I remember a conversation with Alan Bush many years ago. He told me of a discussion he had once had in Moscow with Shostakovich on the general subject of revision of scores, especially after first performances. Shostakovich has always been the practical composer, with a massive workload of not only official commissions but also light music, films and stage productions. He said that he never had time to revise anything, and indeed regarded the practice as interfering with the first flash of inspiration. That was not strictly the truth: he sometimes was forced into the process of revision and rewriting on political grounds. Even so, his comment has left me with a sneaking suspicion that some of his music might seem over-extended, if only he had occasionally picked up the pruning shears after hearing one or another of his symphonies in the light of actual performance.
Not that there is any spare flesh in the thirteenth symphony Babi Yar and it is the longest of Shostakovich’s symphonies. Even the final movement – in which a solo bassoon continually and bossily tries to interrupt the quick flickerings of the flutes and violins, finally abandoning the struggle to a quivering celesta – serves to illustrate the frustrated ambition of anyone who seeks to make a career out of independent thought in the context of a repressive state apparatus. The composer knew a great deal about that. He also firmly controlled the thematic structure of the symphony, which might threaten to sprawl in its treatment of five independent poems that really have little in common. Not only is the recapitulation of the opening material during the first movement transformed from whimpering muted trumpets to a screaming nightmare transfiguration ironically marked in the score as espressivo. It then returns as a sort of motto theme in the later poems, most notably as an outburst of fury in the third movement, as the women patiently wait in freezing queues outside the shops.
Ryan Bancroft and the orchestra were fully alive to these dramatic contrasts. The ticking castanets marked the inexorable passage of time as the hours pass queuing in funereal stillness – or the violent eruptions when the mob beats up the boy’s family in Tsarist Russia, or the Nazis break down to the door to Anne Frank’s refuge in Amsterdam. The scherzo, which celebrates the sense of humour that can poke ridicule at the totalitarian state, also had a sense of desperation about its frantic dance. The fourth movement, which Evgeni Yevtushenko added to his verses at Shostakovich’s request, refers obliquely to the contemporary thaw in the repressive state apparatus, with the ominous reflection that repression can so easily return. That is equally a lesson for our own times and for the composer’s era.
The vocal writing in the score is quite extraordinary. A solo bass and a male chorus sing almost entirely in unison, descending into the lower depths of the voices. The choir here consisted of members of the BBC National Chorus of Wales with a raft of supplementary extras. That included, I believe, recruits from Gloucester Choral Society and a couple of singers from the Welsh National Opera Chorus, all of them, so far as I could tell, singing in idiomatic Russian. The soloist James Platt is already established as a major force among young singers, with appearances in such heavyweight roles as Hunding and Sarastro. He was absolutely in control of the extended vocal range. The choir adjusted a couple of their deepest passages up an octave, presumably for reasons of audibility, but otherwise yielded nothing to the tones of Slavic rivals. Platt maintained firm tone throughout, and there was never a suspicion of the wobble that even now remains endemic among many Russian basses. If there was the slightest suggestion that he might have been getting tired after such a massive assignment, there was hardly a hint of it. (He had sung the whole score twice in less than twenty-four hours, since the programme had been given the evening before in Swansea.)
My only mild concern arose with the passages where the composer asks the soloist and chorus to unite, where Platt left the lines to the chorus alone. That is in line with standard operatic practice, but in this case the precedent is wrong. Shostakovich specifically wrote out the line twice, once in each part. He wanted the unison for reinforcement – not, as here, a recession in the sound – and he clearly meant precisely what he said. But it is a minor point. Indeed, I cannot tell from the sound on the old recordings supervised by the composer whether he actually insisted in performance on compliance with what he had written in the score. At one and the same time the tone of restraint, which can sometimes afflict other performances of Shostakovich, and which is so deleterious to his emotional engagement with the audience, was avoided. On the other hand, Ryan Bancroft’s control of the score was exemplary. He never sacrificed atmosphere in the cause of excitement, and that made it all the more effective.
With such an overwhelming dramatic and emotional experience as Babi Yar, it must have puzzled the programme planners what could possibly make up the duration of the concert. The choice of Beethoven’s iconoclastic First Piano Concerto was rather inspired. True, the snooks that Beethoven cocks at period classical practice in the course of the concerto are less startling to modern audiences than they were to his contemporaries. Still, Jonathan Biss played up the humour in the passages where Beethoven suddenly abandons his earnest duple-time passagework to skip away in frivolous triplets, or where the rondo theme trips over itself as it plunges recklessly towards the conclusion.
Biss also gave us Beethoven’s own alternative cadenza, very extravagantly extended. This totally wrecks the proportions of the first movement but allows the composer to tease both orchestra and audience. He hints that he is coming to a conclusion with a customary trill, only to veer off again in a new direction, and finally leads back to the tutti coda; an unexpectedly soft detached chord breaks practically all the rules in the classical book. Beethoven was just as much a revolutionary in his own times as was Shostakovich. It was good to have a performance which gloried in the fact. It need hardly be added that the actual performance of the notes was totally spick-and-span. There was much shading of expression from both soloist and orchestra. Beethoven would certainly have appreciated it even if he did not write it all down.
The afternoon programme had originally been scheduled for the much larger St David’s Hall in Cardiff. It was moved to the smaller, more resonant Hoddinott Hall after the discovery of structural faults in the roof of the former venue last autumn. It is probably just as well; the climaxes of Babi Yar would probably have brought the ceiling down anyway. In the Hoddinott Hall, the sound was overwhelming, and left the audience in a state of exhaustion. My thanks to the BBC for their provision of parallel texts in Russian and English, which are absolutely essential to any proper understanding of this music.
The performance also showed that Welsh choirs are perfectly capable of handling the big Russian choral works as well as native speakers. In the 1970s, I once tried to persuade the late Glynne Jones and his innovative Pendyrus choir to schedule Babi Yar, but to no avail. It still strikes me that the symphony would work very well in English translation, especially if a new singing version could be devised to avoid the somewhat pedestrian style of the usual version of Yevtushenko’s poem that Anglophone audiences get. But the poet only died in 2017, so I would imagine we would have to wait another sixty years before the copyright problems could be overcome. All the same, I think that Shostakovich would have welcomed a performance which spoke directly to audiences in their own tongue. In the score, he goes out of his way to ensure that not a word of the Russian text is obscured.
The concert was being recorded for relay on BBC Radio 3 on 20 February. Audiences worldwide should keep their eyes peeled for the appearance of the listings. It will be available thereafter on BBC Sounds. The whole evening was a considerable feather in the cap for Ryan Bancroft and the orchestra, and an overwhelming experience for those of us lucky enough to experience it in the flesh. One hopes some of that will come across on the air.
Paul Corfield Godfrey