United Kingdom Schoenberg, Weinberg, Shostakovich: Gidon Kremer (violin), Alexander Roslavets (narrator/bass), London Philharmonic Choir (artistic director: Neville Creed), London Philharmonic Orchestra / Andrey Boreyko (conductor). Royal Festival Hall, London, 27.11.2024. (CK)
Schoenberg – A Survivor from Warsaw
Weinberg – Violin Concerto
Shostakovich – Symphony No.13 (‘Babi Yar’)
A Dark Century: so the London Philharmonic Orchestra titled this concert, and as the music made its impact the conviction grew inexorably that we live in one that is – actually and potentially – equally dark.
In his seven-minute shock tactic A Survivor from Warsaw – written only two years after World War II had ended – Schoenberg uses large forces in a graphic depiction of Nazi cruelty and Jewish suffering. Alexander Roslavets made a sonorous, commanding and compassionate narrator; but his voice is simply too beautiful – Abzählen! should set our teeth on edge. It was moving and effective to see the basses of the LPO Choir getting to their feet one by one to sing the Shema Yisroel, but the orchestra does not endorse their faith: the music is brutally truncated.
In the programme Jeremy Eichler likened Schoenberg’s piece to Guernica. Picasso’s words on the role of Art, written around that time, might stand (suitably modified) as motto for this concert: ‘Painting is not done to decorate apartments; it is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.’
Mieczyslaw Weinberg was a real survivor from Warsaw: escaping, aged 19, while the rest of his family was lost to the Holocaust. No surprise, then, that his music has an almost Mahlerian emotional ambivalence, with subtle inflections of colour and mood: in his Violin Concerto martial, almost mechanistic music alternates with angular lyricism with a touch of chill in it. Even in the lovely slow movement this lyricism seems to be communing with itself rather than trying to tug at our heartstrings; the finale’s festive march has a hint of a goose step, yet the concerto ends with a brief but moving benediction.
What a privilege to see Gidon Kremer and to hear him play. Slim, white-haired, only the barest hint in his movements that he is not far off eighty: one of the great musicians of our time, and one of the most self-effacing. With his Kremerata Baltica he has done much to champion the composers of his region and beyond: Pärt, Schnittke, Gubaidulina and many others. He gave the American premiere of Weinberg’s concerto, with the concert’s conductor, Andrey Boreyko. The sound he conjured from his violin was closer to a fragile thread than a full tone: not a defect, but an acute interpretative act. His encore, Silvestrov’s Serenade, seemed a distillation of the unspoken feeling in the Weinberg Violin Concerto and in his own realisation of it. Time stood still.
For me – despite the deserved popularity of the formally orthodox Fifth and Tenth with audiences and critics alike – the greatest Shostakovich symphonies are those in which the determination to confront darkness forces the composer outside, or beyond, orthodoxy: the Fourth, the Eighth and the Thirteenth (as with Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, I am not counting No.14 as a symphony). None of these symphonies achieves the kind of resolution most of the others do, ironically or otherwise.
This LPO concert culminated in a magnificent performance of the Thirteenth Symphony, conductor Andrey Boreyko laying out the score unobtrusively but with exemplary clarity and, where needed, maximum force. It was an uncomfortable listen: barely a quarter of the way into our own century, already littered with atrocities, genocide and war, the music compelled us to acknowledge the composer not just as witness to history, but as prophet of our own time. Perhaps this is part of Jeremy Eichler’s meaning when he writes of ‘music’s potency as a medium of cultural memory…its ability to short-circuit the centuries by yoking “then” and “now” within a single performance.’ The site of the Babi Yar massacre, we remember, is just outside Kyiv: Putin’s missiles have destroyed a building there which was to be a Holocaust museum.
Yevtushenko’s poems are angry and subversive enough, whether in protest, sardonic humour or mourning, and were powerfully delivered by Alexander Roslavets and the forty basses of the London Philharmonic Choir; but the real current of outrage courses through the orchestral music, bursting through the texture in those ironclad, overpowering marches that crash into the opening movement and elsewhere. Yet after the creeping horror of Fears, the penultimate movement, the music seems to subvert the text, becoming (in both senses) lighter; that frolicking pair of flutes remind me of the first shoots of new life, in flutes, piccolos, oboe and solo violin, in the first movement of Mahler’s Third. What is going on? Not transfiguration, for sure; but perhaps a hint that humanity’s capacity for self-renewal isn’t extinguished yet. The quiet conclusion – that bell again, from the beginning – doesn’t say anything, one way or the other.
I have said nothing about the often-scorching brilliance of the LPO’s playing, or about the multifarious solos from piccolo to bassoon to tuba. This was a concert in which, for all the artistry on display, the message overshadowed the medium. After A Survivor from Warsaw my neighbour said we probably shouldn’t be applauding. In truth, I felt this after the Shostakovich: but applaud I did and joined the many others who were getting to their feet.
Chris Kettle