Ahen Berlin’s Konzerthaus planned a Shostakovich homage for March 2022 two years ago, nobody could have guessed the oppressive situation the company would find itself in with Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. The question now is whether that grimacing double-faced attitude that Dmitri Shostakovich felt compelled to do for a long time could be a foreshadowing, perhaps even a model, for artistic survival under a manipulative-autocratic dictatorship that is just beginning to tighten in Russia. The artist’s person and life become an unexpectedly updated model case.
And his music? There are three Shostakovich novels from the past decade; alongside those by Sarah Quigley and William T. Vollmann, most recently Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time. From him there was a reading combined with chamber music in Berlin. But in all three books, the sounds themselves, through which Shostakovich communicated to the world, remain relatively peripheral. Perhaps because they not only say more than his socialist-realist analysts were able to get across at the time, but possibly also less clearly than the clichés about him suggest? The creator as a symbolic figure behind which his art becomes secondary: one is reminded of the attitude test discussions about the attitude of Russian artists to the Putin regime.
The right action at the right time
Not least because of these areas of friction, there is always nothing better to do than to play and listen to it as often as possible. In this sense, the undertaking of the concert hall was the right action at the right time. And when, on one of the evenings, Shostakovich’s E minor piano trio from 1944 was paired with Messiaen’s “Quatuor pour la fin du temps”, which had been composed only a little earlier in German captivity, enormous tension oscillated between these poles and formed the image of two uprooted individuals who seek new anchorages with desperate intensity.
In the Russian’s deeply torn work, in which fields of nagging unrest and strong-willed perseverance are not carried out one after the other, but rather piled on top of each other, this search for perspective was less clear even then than in the Frenchman’s vision, which spans worlds and times. The violinist Baiba Skride and her cello colleague Alban Gerhardt as well as Steven Osborne on the grand piano suppressed the tones of soft, painful reminiscences (the trio was intended as a memorial piece for a close friend who had died) in Shostakovich in favor of a hard, raw-fleshed violence, especially in the final movement.
The worn out man of sorrows
The Russian’s entire work is dominated by such brutal ambivalences. But sometimes they point in completely different directions, and even an undertaking like the one in Berlin reveals certain difficulties in breaking away from the image of the man of sorrows worn out between conformity and subversion – which he certainly was, but not only and not for life. Here, too, it would depend on further tests in active playing and listening, whether the pieces dedicated to the Russian revolutions or Lenin really have to be less ambiguous and enigmatic than others just because of these dedications; and besides, it wasn’t and isn’t forbidden to stick to (imagined or suggested) ideals and still view their implementation critically. Instead of the eighth string quartet, which can be heard very often, it could have been one of the other fourteen, which are hardly less haunting.
On the other hand, there was even a part of the notorious tribute to Stalin, “The Song of the Woods”, alienated by an organ transcription. The appearance of the Konzerthausorchester under its leader Christoph Eschenbach, in which Shostakovich’s E flat major Cello Concerto was coupled with his eighth symphony, was undoubtedly a feat. The concert appeared as a grumpy, restless, sarcastic tumbling about in a cage throwing energies with the power of desperation into emptiness, which the soloist Bruno Philippe perhaps turned out to be a bit too toothless. But the mighty symphony of 1943, a war piece like the piano trio, revealed in this enormously condensed interpretation of stony earnestness and steely assertiveness, with the immediately moving “human voices” of the woodwind solos and the fragile but enlightened silence of its ending, what Shostakovich has always been: the composer of a sometimes misguided but inextinguishable hope.