Andris Nelsons’s Shostakovich cycle, taken from live performances in Boston, has been released in rather haphazard groupings, and this final instalment is no exception. It bundles together four of the least performed of the 15 symphonies, spanning 35 years of his composing career. The 13th symphony very much stands apart from the other works, but those three were all composed as anniversary works: the second, from 1927, marked the 10th anniversary of the October revolution, the third, composed two years later, was a celebration of the May Day holiday and the victory of the proletariat over tsarist oppression, while in 1961 the 12th again celebrated the October revolution, and Lenin’s leadership of it, in a programmatic depiction of its crucial episodes.
The 12th seems to be by some distance the weakest, most trite of all Shostakovich’s symphonies, composed at a time when he found it hard to summon enthusiasm for what the revolution had brought upon him and his fellow Russians. But the two early works, the products of a young, still idealistic composer, are fascinating if flawed scores, both involving a chorus, and containing some of the most radical music he ever produced: the second, especially, with its whirling, densely packed orchestral writing climaxing in a 13-voice fugue, regularly veers into atonality.
Though the bright, brash sound of the Boston orchestra is well suited to this primary coloured music, Nelsons’s performances never quite have the energy this music needs, so that revolutionary zeal is replaced by routine. His account of the 13th, though, is a different matter. Completed in 1962, it’s a setting of five poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, each focusing on a different aspect of Soviet life, though it begins with Babi Yar, a ferocious denunciation of antisemitism describing the massacre of 100,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine in 1941-43. The whole symphony is fuelled by the anger of its poetry, and with Matthias Goerne as the light-toned but eloquent bass-baritone soloist, Nelsons responds accordingly, so that his Shostakovich cycle at least ends as convincingly as it began eight years ago.
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