Breaking the code: Collon and his Aurora Orchestra unlock the secrets at the heart of Shostakovich’s Fifth 

United Kingdom BBC Proms 2025 [16] – Shostakovich’s Fifth by Heart: A musical and dramatic exploration of Shostakovich’s Symphony No.5: Max Revell (actor/dancer), Polly Frame, Craig Stein, Sarah Twomey (actors), Samuel West (Voice of Stalin), Petroc Trelawny (Voice of Telephone Operator). Aurora Orchestra / Nicholas Collon (conductor). Royal Albert Hall, London. 16.8.2025. (CSa)

Shostakovich – Symphony No.5 in D minor

In his postscript to The Noise of Time, a novel based on Dmitri Shostakovich’s lifelong struggle to survive as an artist under Stalin and the Soviet regime, Julian Barnes writes: ‘Shostakovich was a multiple narrator of his own life…Truth was a hard thing to find, let alone maintain in Stalin’s Russia’. What was the truth beneath Shostakovich’s elaborately coded Fifth Symphony? Was this carefully crafted masterwork, composed in 1937 at the height of Stalin’s purges and officially presented with the subtitle A Soviet Artist’s Practical Creative Reply to Just Criticism, a genuine expression of contrition in response to official denunciation of his hugely successful opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District? Was this a pusillanimous attempt by Shostakovich to conform after threats of banishment or worse? Or was it a courageous and subtly disguised act of cultural defiance?

These questions, particularly topical in the last few weeks in the USA  where artistic freedom is under threat, were central to the musical and dramatic exploration of the work in the first part of this BBC Prom. They were compellingly presented from memory by Nicholas Collon and the Aurora Orchestra, together with dancers and actors in a Frantic Assembly production.

The background history which led to the creation of the Fifth Symphony is well documented and was chillingly summarised in Jane Mitchell’s tightly written script. In January 1936, Stalin (the disembodied voice of Samuel West) attended a performance of Lady Macbeth. He reportedly left in the third act, enraged by its depictions of adultery, corruption, murder and raw sexuality, and affronted by the ‘coarseness and vulgarity’ of the orchestration which he characterised as ‘left wing cacophony’.  The next day an anonymous editorial appeared in Pravda titled Muddle instead of Music denouncing what it called ‘deliberate dissonance and chaos’. Within weeks, performances were cancelled across the USSR, and Shostakovich, convinced his life and career were over, reportedly spent sleepless nights in his Moscow apartment, fully clothed and suitcase packed, awaiting arrest.

Lining the front of the Royal Albert Hall’s choir stalls, a semi-circle of screened mugshots enlarged the faces of the anonymous cultural Committee whose task it was to issue ‘proper guidelines’ and to apply a set of absurd criteria to decide whether to authorise the work. Before them, Shostakovich (actor/dancer Max Revell) turned and twisted like a manipulated rag doll as his close friend, the celebrated conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky (Nicholas Collon in another extraordinary feat of memory), argued the composer’s case. Extracts from each of the four movements were played and dissected by the box ticking bureaucrats. Mvravinsky was closely questioned about the composer’s musical influences and underlying intentions, and his answers were carefully framed to meet Party approval. The same extracts were played a second time, but this time with coded double messages deciphered and alternative explanations suggested. Narrative and counter narrative provided an ingenious pathway way through the dark ambiguities of the music, and one which drew appreciative and sympathetic chuckles from the captivated audience.

So, was the brutal opening theme in the symphony’s first movement Moderato a Beethoven-inspired expression of heroic triumph or a relentless modernist allusion to oppression? Was the ländler-like dance in the Scherzo a Beethovenian melody which ‘workers might sing in the fields while reaping the harvest’, or a grotesque parody in the style of the despised Mahler? Was the Committee right in finding that the tragic lament in the Largo, often interpreted as a requiem for Stalin’s victims, nothing more than a good clear melody in the tradition of Tchaikovsky? And what about the raucous D minor finale, officially justified by the authorities as a triumphant victory march. Or was it more likely to be understood as a cri de coeur – ‘as if someone were beating you with a stick, saying “your business is rejoicing”? ‘The truth is that we’ll never know’ admitted Collon.

These unanswered questions hung in the air during a blistering and uninterrupted performance in the concert’s second half. Collon is an inspirational conductor who liberated his score-free and (mostly) upstanding players in those biting opening bars of the Moderato. The remorseless march that followed, all braying horns and piercing trumpets, was superbly balanced given the considerable acoustical challenges of the Hall. The second movement Allegretto was (to at least one member of the audience) unquestionably Mahlerian in colour, with some fine ensemble work from the winds, and a glorious exchange between the first violin (Alexandra Wood) and principal flute (the multi-talented script-writing Jane Mitchell). A Largo of almost ethereal lightness hovered in the air, while the final Allegro non troppo with its angry militaristic coda stunned and thrilled. This was no triumphal march but a performance uncompromising in its defiance. Collon and his band gave us a remarkable evening, which, true to the BBC’s guiding principle of public service, kept its listeners informed, educated and entertained.

Chris Sallon

Featured Image: Shostakovich’s Fifth by Heart with the Aurora Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Collon © BBC/Andy Paradise

Production:
Jane Mitchell – Co-Director/Scriptwriter
James Bonas – Co-Director
Scott Graham (for Frantic Assembly) – Co-Director
Sean Hollands (for Frantic Assembly)- Associate
Zakk Hein- Video designer
David Bishop – Lighting designer