United States Shostakovich: Baiba Skride (violin), Boston Symphony Orchestra / Andris Nelsons (conductor). Symphony Hall, Boston, 3.5.2025. (ES-S)
Shostakovich – Violin Concerto No.1 in A minor, Op.77; Symphony No.8 in C minor, Op.65
This concert marked the final performance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2024–2025 season at Symphony Hall before the ensemble’s upcoming European tour. It also concluded ‘Decoding Shostakovich’, a monthlong festival timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death, and brought a sense of closure to Andris Nelsons’s decade-long exploration of Shostakovich’s music with the BSO.
The pairing of the Violin Concerto No.1 and the Symphony No.8 offered a revealing juxtaposition – two works rooted in the darkest years of Shostakovich’s life, yet starkly different in scale and tone. Written in 1947 and withheld from performance until after Stalin’s death, the concerto channels anguish inward: its brooding Nocturne, sardonic Scherzo and harrowing Passacaglia form a tightly wound psychological portrait, with the soloist as both narrator and witness. The Eighth Symphony, composed in 1943 during the siege of Leningrad, expands that terrain onto a massive orchestral canvas, confronting collective trauma through long, grinding structures and mechanized violence. Yet for all their differences, both works chart a similar emotional trajectory – one that begins in darkness and culminates in uneasy quiet, withholding the kind of heroic resolution that official doctrine demanded. Their formal clarity – whether passacaglia, scherzo or sonata form – serves not to uphold tradition but to contain and encode a deeper tension. And within their vast or intimate frameworks, the prominence of isolated instrumental voices – whether the violin alone or a solo English horn amid the ruins – underscores Shostakovich’s enduring commitment to the solitary, often embattled voice of individual expression.
Baiba Skride is no stranger to Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No.1, having performed it multiple times with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelsons. Her performance was marked by taut control and introspective clarity. From the first bars of the Nocturne, Skride avoided overt dramatization, allowing the music to unfold with a quiet intensity that felt personal and unaffected. Her tone, while slender at times, carried a steely focus – well-suited to the concerto’s inward and unrelenting intensity.
In the Scherzo, Skride sharpened her articulation without exaggeration, dispatching the biting rhythms and sudden dynamic shifts with precision and restraint. She resisted the tendency to overemphasize the grotesque in the movement’s distorted dance, opting instead for clarity and momentum. The Passacaglia that followed demanded not only emotional weight but architectural control, and Skride paced the unfolding of the variations with unshowy concentration. The movement’s gravity was deepened by the burnished sound of the BSO’s lower strings and the solemn, unhurried statements in the brass.
The long solo cadenza – by turns reflective, tense and searching – emerged as the expressive core of Skride’s interpretation, rendered not as a showpiece but as a tightly controlled inner monologue. The Burlesque finale followed with a burst of sardonic energy. Skride attacked its biting lines with wiry intensity, while Nelsons and the BSO matched her with sharp-edged momentum and exacting detail. The orchestral backdrop bristled – snapping brass, dry percussion and acidic winds – underscoring the movement’s manic vitality without overpowering the soloist. The final bars, punched out with grim exuberance, left little doubt that this was triumphal in quotation marks: a brilliant, bitter curtain to a work that never fully lets down its guard.
Bleak, massive and emotionally unrelenting, Shostakovich’s Symphony No.8 unfolds across five movements and nearly seventy minutes, tracing a descent into devastation and uneasy return. Nelsons approached it not as an epic to be endured but as a deeply layered psychological narrative. He paced the expansive first movement – with its long Adagio introduction and eventual eruption of intensity – with inexorable deliberation, giving space to its drawn-out lines and oppressive harmonic drift while shaping the climaxes with unflinching force. The music spoke through accumulation and contrast – a landscape built from fragments, eruptions and silences.
The transition into the faster section felt less like a shift in tempo than a gradual tightening of pressure – an acceleration that seemed inevitable rather than dramatic. The BSO’s strings maintained remarkable cohesion through dense contrapuntal textures, while the brass added blunt-edged force to the climaxes, cutting through without softening their brutality. Nelsons let the violence crest without rounding its contours, emphasizing the movement’s sense of inescapable momentum.
The second and third movements formed a brutal center, driven by compulsive rhythms and sardonic energy. In the Allegretto, Lorna McGhee’s flute brought a fleeting grace to the otherwise grinding repetition, her lines skating lightly over the pulse as if recalling something human within the mechanized irony. The Allegro non troppo movement was the most overtly aggressive, with Thomas Rolfs’s trumpet taking on a brutally prominent role – its shrill interjections and militarized figurations delivered with biting clarity and implacable drive.
In the fourth movement, the Largo, the mood shifted entirely: Robert Sheena’s English horn solo emerged as a voice of remembrance, almost fragile against the spare, hovering string writing that followed. The stillness here – its bare textures and suspended phrasing – was one of the evening’s most harrowing moments, a clearing in which the music could breathe, though not recover.
The final movement of the symphony, as shaped by Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, emerged as a study in quiet persistence rather than closure. Nelsons resisted the temptation to inject false optimism or undue gravity into the music’s elliptical phrases. Instead, the orchestra allowed its hesitant gestures – particularly in the winds and upper strings – to unfold with subdued clarity, as if the music were testing its own capacity to move forward. Despite the brighter key, there was little sense of arrival. The mood remained reserved, almost reticent, with melodies that looped and recoiled and textures that thinned rather than bloomed. In its closing, fragmentary measures, there seemed to be a premonition of the eeriness found in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the same flickering ambiguity, as if waking from a nightmare unsure whether it had truly ended – or what its meaning was. The soft, uncertain close, played with understated precision, left the hall suspended in a silence more powerful than any affirmative final chord.
Edward Sava-Segal