Tarfumes.com - Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7

Probably no purely instrumental symphony by Shostakovich has given rise to so much extra-musical comment, but to my mind it can all be dispensed with. I am not troubled, or even visited, by thoughts of heroic workers, the sufferings of the people of Leningrad or the composer's uneasy relationship with the authorities when I hear it. And while it is certainly not unalloyed `absolute' music in the sense that Brahms's symphonies are that, the extent of the extra-musical expression imposed on it by its creator is not much more than one normally finds in Beethoven. The influence of Mahler on this work seems to me to be strong, not least on its expansiveness. The adagio alone is as long as many a Haydn symphony, and the first movement takes as long as Beethoven usually takes over all four, so music-lovers new to the work are counselled to listen in a more Mahler-oriented frame of receptivity. The resemblance to Mahler extends, in this symphony, even to the tone of voice that this chameleon among 20th century composers elects to adopt for the occasion, and it comes through most strongly and consistently, for me, in the slow movement.

If the first movement does not give you some problems I can only say it ought to. An enormous amount of the movement is taken up with a long series of repetitions of a single phrase with the orchestration building up over a long crescendo in a manner recalling Ravel's Bolero, a resemblance that cannot conceivably be accidental. I maintain, in the face of any orthodoxy to the contrary, that this sequence has absolutely no musical merit whatsoever. The theme itself is trivial and ridiculous, justly parodied by Bartok in the intermezzo interotto of the concerto for orchestra; and while Shostakovich is a thorough master of orchestral sound, I can't hear him as an absolute wizard in that department in the sense that Ravel is, or, come to that, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky, Strauss, Elgar or Walton.

Understandably enough, this symphony, written in 1941, was pressed into service with the patriotic spin-machine. The composer himself wrote a lengthy and dutiful commentary in furtherance of the its role as an ideological statement. However when the pressure came off he let out that he had planned it before the war. Depending on how you wish to take this intermediate version, it may in some sense be expressing anguish at the treatment of Leningrad by his own government. However there is a further twist, and there appears also to be some connexion with the Psalms. One approach to this music is to root deeply into these counter-indicative clues. The one I prefer is to ignore them altogether. Much (not all) of the first movement notwithstanding, this is music of major significance, intelligible and imposing without external references.

The 7th Symphony reveals it's wartime subject only in a few places, mostly in the first and second movements. Most obviously you have the famous "Theme and Variations" development, where Shostakovitch's seemingly innocuous first theme is gradually brutalized by the orchestra, leading to a shattering climax. And yet, most of the work is darker, less propaganda than lament. The third movement in particular seems gorgeously tragic.

The Haitink series with the Concertgebow is a wonderful Shostakovitch cycle, one that I aquired in it's last incarnation. Haitink is not usually a conductor that I think of as exciting, but he rises to Shostakovitch very well. (The composer seems to get the best out of a lot of mediocre conductors. Rostropovitch does Shostakovitch extremely well, even though most of the rest of his tenure with the National Symphony was unspectacular. Same holds true for Maxime Shostakovitch.) This CD would make a good choice for this wonderful symphony.