Germany Shostakovich Festival Leipzig 2025 [1]: Dmitry Trifonov (piano), Gewandhaus Orchestra / Andris Nelsons (conductor), Gewandhaus, Leipzig. 15.5.2025. (GT)
Shostakovich – Festive Overture, Op.96, Piano Concerto No.2 in F major, Op.102; Symphony No.4 in C minor, Op.43
The Leipzig Gewandhaus has a tradition of staging annual festivals covering all the celebrated works of the composer. In recent years there have been surveys of all Mahler symphonies performed by different world class orchestras, however in 2025, the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Shostakovich is being commemorated with an almost complete survey of the symphonies, concertos, chamber music, songs and choral works, opera, and music for theatre and cinema.
There was a two-day symposium involving an intensive survey of the composer’s creativity and that of his contemporaries. Lectures were given before each concert in English (Stephen Johnson) and in German (Ann Katrin Zimmermann) and on some evenings documentary and feature films covering his life and music were presented. All separate from this is another festival of Shostakovich’s chamber music at Gorlitz in Saxony next month. The town is where Shostakovich composed his Eighth String Quartet after visiting the bombed out city of Dresden in 1950.
To launch this massive dedication to the memory of the Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich with the lively and gorgeous Festive Overture was fitting, for it reflects the magical colourful orchestration by the composer during his happiest period of life. Andris Nelsons brought out all the musicality of the ephemeral piece; there were delightful contributions from the brass group, especially the tuba, and abetted by the melodiously nuanced tone of the strings, and towards the culmination, by the precision of the grand casa and the timpani, bringing a grandly optimistic finale. The enjoyment of the musicians in playing this music was evident from their smiles during the delightful life-enhancing music, as if smiling together with Shostakovich’s brilliantly colourful invention.
The Shostakovich Festival in Leipzig has engaged some of the world’s finest interpreters, and one could hardly imagine a more sublime pianist than the brilliant Dmitry Trifonov. The young Russian is also a composer, and it showed in the late romantic Second Piano Concerto, as in the Allegro he often announced weighty chords making the piano like a percussion instrument; none the less, he couldn’t lessen the sparkling youthful invention of the music, and which was enhanced by superb contributions from Riccardo Terzo on the bassoon, the tuba and the oboe of Immaculada Veses Gil. The slow movement (Andante) was nostalgically colourful and delightfully romantic, yet much of this beautifully expressed romanticism seemed naïve, and romanticism seems foreign to the composer. This was machine-like, mechanic-like modernism mixed with lyricism. In the third movement (Allegro) we heard a performance of great mastery supported with remarkable skill and musicality under Nelsons’s direction. In response to the overwhelming applause, Trifonov played an encore of the Scherzo No.1 by Shostakovich. The brief piece reflected a voyage from classicism to modernism with little invention, yet it was gorgeously acerbic.
In directing the great dramatic opening bars of the once long-neglected Fourth Symphony (Allegretto poco moderato), Nelsons emphatically stamped his feet to ensure the increased degree of power and dynamics from his musicians. His demands were rewarded in a boundlessly expansive passage of playing, however the tempo lessened as the strings seemed to be relaxed; the apparent lethargy was soon overcome with inordinate virtuosity from the woodwind, especially the clarinets, the oboes and the harmony of ensemble was fabulous. The Gewandhaus strings revealed why they are acclaimed worldwide, the sound picture created was extraordinary, with Gundel Jannemann-Fischer on the cor anglais, and the violin solo from Sebastian Breuninger magnificent in evincing the immensely powerful concepts of the symphony. In general, the first violins are extraordinary, as if listening to a single violinist, so unified was the playing.
In the brief second movement (Moderato con moto) the clock ticking was superbly characterised by the xylophone, and in the finale (Largo-Allegro) there were astonishingly gorgeous passages from Terzo’s bassoon and Veses’s oboe heralding a great intensity from the entire orchestra rising to a huge climax on the timpani from Tom Greenleaves and the grand casa, and backed by terrific contributions from the trombone of Tomáš Trnka before the slow drawing down to the emotionally bleak bars from the harps and the celesta. This was an extraordinary opening to this two-and-a-half-week festival, and it was encouraging to witness a full audience, which augurs well for the coming weeks here in Leipzig.
Gregor Tassie
Featured Image: Andris Nelsons conducts pianist Dmitry Trifonov and the Gewandhaus Orchestra © Jens Gerber