Shostakovitch's Symphony No. 11: a Soul-searing Mirror of our Troubled Times

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Jean-François Rivest vows an unshakable love for Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovitch. In the 2002-2003 season alone, he directed the Laval Symphony Orchestra in Shostakovitch's Symphony No. 5, then made the arrangements and directed the Ottawa Thirteen Strings in a revisited version of the Third Quartet. On April 4, he will lead his students from the University of Montreal orchestra in a performance of the Symphony No. 11. The maestro explains what thrills him about the composer and presents his vision of the masterpiece.

I regularly program Shostakovitch's works because I believe that he is a major composer. I have developed a personal liking for him. I think that I am really not a very serious person in everyday life (Rivest is particularly fond of the caustic humour of François Pérusse), but I love serious music. I believe that too often we tend to analyze music with a magnifying glass and view it as an object of knowledge. Shostakovitch, on the contrary, remains in direct contact with our emotions.

Shostakovitch commands special attention from the public. One music lover wrote that his works crave for a public. Even though the composer strives to convey faithfully the image of one nation, he depicts the woes of all nations, using the disasters and cataclysms survived by the Russian people. In his music he guides us to an intimate understanding of other people's day-to-day lives.

I strongly believe that music is the best medium for empathy. I am convinced that we absolutely need empathy to play music, empathy towards the public, the composer, and the musicians with whom we play. This empathy allows the listener or the interpreter to feel the emotions experienced by others, even without having lived through them personally.

The Symphony No. 5, probably Shostakovitch's most famous work, remains fundamentally classical: first movement in sonata form, slow movement, scherzo, and finale. Underneath appearances, it was composed with an ultra-modern language and in this it succeeds (I mention it to allow you to understand the Eleventh). It creates a channel that may be perceived by certain party members as glorifying the recent USSR and its army (there are several military marches), but in which I believe the population recognizes its hatred for military power, oppression, and humiliation. Music is transformed into an outcry for survival, the raw side of life.

The multiple facets of Shostakovitch's work fascinate me as well the power imbedded in his music, but I don't mean the surface-level power of cymbals and trumpets. I would compare it to a hologram. Behind a very simple and repetitive writing composed primarily of quarter and eighth notes, with mostly a classical structure and sometimes simplistic themes (the Eleventh presents popular songs of the Russian Revolution), it hides an incredibly structured mind which holds all parts together as efficiently as a Beethoven symphony, albeit in a more rocky, crystalline, earthly, sharp, metallic, and compact way.

From Beethoven's Eroica onwards, symphonies have been the mirror of an entire world thought out by the composer, the zenith being achieved, indisputably, in Bruckner's Fifth, Brahms's Second, or Mahler's Ninth. Shostakovitch doesn't fall into this category since communication is the driving power behind his work. He always sets the social context in troubled times, refusing to create a comfortable world for us; his prime goal is to tell us the hardship of his nation. It is not the listener who travels, but Russia which enters into us, aggressively. Thus we owe it to him, on the grounds of human solidarity alone, to feel these emotions.

Although Symphony No. 11 describes the violent events of January 9, 1905, it reflects deep down any uprising against oppression, at any moment in history. Starving peasants march on the St. Petersburg winter palace. The first movement portrays the underlying tension preceding this event: a slow orchestral prelude, but enveloped in a cold ambiance, extreme tension, with the strings straining at discordant chords, trumpets sounding as if preparing for battle, timpani beating erratically. We hear songs of the Revolution from a far distance, very softly and slowly. Almost slyly the second movement starts. Then abruptly the crowd gathers, pushes, the guards push them away, and suddenly the unbelievable occurs: Russians shoot Russians, brothers kill brothers, hundreds lie on the snow in their blood, a vision from hell. The mass hysteria is brilliantly depicted in one of the most horrifying musical narratives known to me, a traumatic experience. The third movement is a gigantic funeral march, rendered in a near-obscene way by its pizzicati, almost dodecaphonic, from which emerges a sublime melody played by the viola. The last movement is ambiguous, as if war were starting again, as if the dead were calling for revenge. Did revolution win or did humans succeed in going beyond their pain? We will never know, as Shostakovitch purposefully maintains his ambiguity.

Technically speaking, the symphony remains very difficult to play, and it is my duty as a conductor to bring out the best in each musician. The music requires close cooperation between musicians, so that they become one with the subject and also have the desire to communicate these emotions. An intent has to be conveyed; this work cannot be treated as an object of beauty to be appreciated. Emotions must be communicated uncompromisingly. The Elventh is more powerful than [Shostakovitch's] preceding musical works, it touches everybody, within the orchestra as well as in the concert hall. The [UdeM] students loved it from the first reading. They talked about it, and some violinists no longer in the orchestra even wanted to rejoin it for this concert. This music shakes your inner soul, haunts you all the way into your dreams.

The maestro's recommendations

Jean-François Rivest recommends three recordings of the Symphony No. 11. Two are historical readings, one by the Moscow Orchestra conducted by Kyril Kondrashin and the other by the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra under Evgeny Mravinsky. There is also a new version by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mstislav Rostropovitch which Rivest terms "astonishing". [Translated by Caroline Labonne]

April 4, salle Claude-Champagne, Montreal, (514) 343-6427