Shostakovich Fifth Symphony Masterworks

Dmitri Shostakovich was born in St Petersburg in the early years of the last century.

He is one of Russia's finest, most popular and most controversial composers.

Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony is one of the great cultural documents of Stalinist Russia.

It was written during the purges

after vicious attacks on his opera Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk.

The symphony, subtitled A Soviet Artist's Reply To Just Criticism,

re-established Shostakovich's reputation as an ideologically sound Soviet composer.

But, since his death in 1975, the most extraordinary battle has raged over his soul.

Was he a loyal son of the Communist regime, or does his music represent a voice of protest and dissent?

This film explores the musical world of this complex man through his Fifth Symphony,

the towering masterpiece of early Soviet music.

We'll rehearse and perform its four movements with the great Russian conductor Valery Gergiev,

working for the first time with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Great. Well, I'm very impressed. It's very, very powerful.

What I need here is, "De-da! De-do! De-da! Where? Where? What? What? Who?"

Straight 32.

'Speaking about the Fifth Symphony, I have to maybe even insist

'that it is not only about evil and it's not only about the Soviet Empire.'

I think it's time to defend this man.

I think his life is much richer than...

this kind of simple, dramatic, tragic, but very simple, you know, struggle.

Today you can't repeat and repeat the same thing, so you just have to see more music in this music.

More music.

SINGING IN RUSSIAN

RUSSIAN

Dmitri Shostakovich grew up in quite extraordinary times.

He was born in Imperial Russia in 1906, so that meant he spent his youth in the Russian Revolution.

Against this backdrop of social and political unrest, modernism was flourishing in the arts.

THE INTERNATIONALE IS SUNG IN RUSSIAN

Russian art was now producing its own distinctive leaders, like Malevich.

After the 1917 Revolution, artists became a central force in the rebuilding of society

with an explosion of cultural innovation.

From the abstract Constructivism of Tatlin and Gabo...

to the graphics of El Lissitzky...

and the films of Vertov and Eisenstein.

In 1925, the year that Eisenstein produced Battleship Potemkin,

the star student of the renamed Leningrad Conservatoire,

19-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich, presented his First Symphony.

Here is energy which is his own,

but also there was an energy of the time which gave him so much support.

We shouldn't forget Shostakovich was part of this phenomenal cultural renaissance in Russia,

especially in Petersburg in the early 20th century.

It didn't start with Stalin. He was already Dmitri Shostakovich

when he composed his First Symphony.

When Shostakovich's father died, the family found itself in a parlous financial state,

so the young composer took jobs pounding the piano in local cinemas,

including this one, the Parisiana on Nevsky Prospect.

Within three years, he was composing his own film scores.

By the age of 25, he was the most radical composer of the new Russia,

with two further symphonies, ballet scores, theatre works and an opera to his name.

But the world was changing fast.

Lenin's death in 1924 had given Stalin scope to orchestrate his own rise to power.

His supremacy brought rigid control to every aspect of life.

Intimidation and murder dealt with any opposition to the supposedly bright and beautiful new order.

The terror and tragedy of the 1930s had arrived.

Meanwhile Shostakovich continued to develop his daring musical language

with his biting new opera, Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk.

The opera was a triumph.

But in January 1936, Stalin came to a performance.

He left after the interval and in what must be the most famous review in history,

the composer was slated in the Party newspaper, Pravda...

"From first moment, listener is shocked by deliberately dissonant confused stream of sound.

"Music quakes, grunts and growls.

"Here we have leftist confusion, instead of natural human music.

"This is a game that may end very badly."

MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN

Someone very strong, very powerful

forced Shostakovich

not to play this dangerous game any more with his fate.

I regret that there is not another great Russian opera

written by Shostakovich.

He was in a way saying goodbye to the music which involves words.

He just decided that symphony is his destiny from then.

In fact, Shostakovich was already working on a symphony when the Pravda attack hit,

his complex, tragic Fourth, which was not performed until 1961, eight years after Stalin's death,

so the first new symphony to be heard from the disgraced composer, in November 1937, was the Fifth.

At the beginning, please.

One...

The Fifth Symphony for me is what I call perfect, well-shaped, incredibly polished.

It starts with a big tension and for a long time only the string section is involved.

He starts to be more complicated,

so we have to avoid maybe there is unbelievable repetitiveness. Just...

HE HUMS ..like sleeping drug.

Figure one.

'You're getting used to a certain atmosphere, to a certain sound.'

You know... # Da-dee!

# Da-da-a! Da-da, da-da. #

You have at least two sides obviously struggling.

Then very carefully some winds start to play.

Yeah, yeah. Good.

Bassoons, very good, but don't show that there is a heavy force entering.

Join strings, play it very easily.

It should be like you come in and say...("What is going there?")

Not that, "Oh, woodwinds are playing a lot of music!" Just very, very carefully, please.

Strings, most important thing I invite you to maybe accept

is that there is no depression in this part of the symphony.

It's rather young hero speaking, # Ta-ra! Ta-ra! #

Or... # Ta-ra-ra... # Or maybe several of them.

But in no way, please, think that... FUNEREAL HUMMING

Bad. Too bad.

It will come later. There will be some problems this hero will face, but it's not yet.

So, before the horn section is introduced,

you are already a very serious way into the symphony, you know.

It's a lot already happening. Then you suddenly see there are trumpets also playing.

Then you see that a trombone has finally started to move.

Then suddenly you have piano.

Great. One warning.

Pizzicato should work hard, but by far the interesting timbre is piano.

By far. We have harp, we had a lot of strings already, timpani is silent,

trumpets practically didn't play, strings worked quite hard. It's the way Shostakovich orchestrated this.

Everything he does is so measured. There is no nonsense.

You can't say, "They all play." They are NOT playing for so much.

Discipline is everywhere in a symphony,

as he was clear. It was totally finished, was a freedom for people.

To move freely was a problem. To speak freely was impossible.

To trust in many was a risk.

And Shostakovich absorbed and felt this quite new atmosphere.

Today I read Herald Tribune.

The front page was saying, "In this vast and chaotic country," that was about Russia today.

Well, it was vast country in '37.

It was not chaotic.

It was iron structure and iron will.

Horror, you know...

and fear.

But no chaos. They could see everything in this huge country.

Figure 27. Please, play it with your instruments lifted up

and with the widest, largest sound you ever use in your professional practice.

# Da! Da! Da! Dee! #

It should be like a laser burning all on its way - burning.

In two...one.

He became so economical, so clever, so smart.

It's like a boxer who doesn't really need 15 rounds to move his big hands, you know.

He maybe knows how to find the moment and do something extremely dangerous, extremely effective.

This is what Shostakovich learnt so quickly in these difficult years.

It was a huge change, huge change.

And he never lost this ability.

MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN

Was it Shostakovich's own idea to use this subtitle, "A Soviet Artist's Reply To Just Criticism"?

No problem, no problem. We're getting there.

It should be a little bit more like a soccer game. You start to play...pshshsh! Run.

The beginning should give this impression, then it settles. So... Bam! Bam! Bam!

In the Fifth Symphony, the huge first movement demands a contrast in the second movement.

Shostakovich had tremendous love for life, tremendous love for life.

He smoked.

He...

was able to drink a big glass of vodka...

just in one go.

He loved football, Shostakovich,

and you hear it in the scherzi which he composed, but still there is some kind of demon in him.

-So, when you have that violin solo in the second movement...

-HE HUMS THE TUNE

..is that not with a smile on the face, do you think?

I think it's a little girl, like a little flower,

under the boot of...

..you know, a soldier.

I think it has sarcastic...

It has a powerful touch.

It has enormous energy, but it also has this skeleton-like, you know, this pizzicato...

doo-doo-doo-doo.

It has always this phantasmagorical element, for me at least.

But, you know, it would be very boring if we all agreed once and for ever that this is it.

We didn't. And even I will maybe disagree with Maxim.

I see Shostakovich smiling, even throughout this symphony. I hear it.

Nothing is accented.

Nothing at all is accented.

There are two things a conductor can think of here.

A, timing.

When? ..When?

B, how? "How?" is much more difficult than "when?"

Like in the best way of singing, you can touch the sound like...

# Ah-h. #

I do nothing of... This is your breath control.

So, I wanted to reach mezzo-forte, but I maybe don't want it to do anything vertical.

Never...

# Dee. #

..anything of this.

So it, from nothing, goes...

# Ah-h-h-h... #

It's a high pilotage. It's the most difficult thing in a stringed instrument.

In the slow movement, Shostakovich allows the listener to, like, open the door

and see...

the very place...

where the most essentially important spiritual items of Shostakovich himself...

..are normally closed to other people.

There's so much beauty there and there's so much tension,

but I really hear Shostakovich, a child sometimes.

This hope, this course, this orchestration with these high strings

very much reminds me what he could experience in the first 15 years of his life.

Beauty...

hope...

love.

I strongly believe that he travels back,

then he...

comes to reality and to danger and deadly risks...

of today.

Maybe it was in a way a self-portrait - I don't know Shostakovich well -

but it's his entire life, you know.

It's this childish and beautiful, very rosy, you know, very hopeful perception of the world

and then...

you know, physical inability to move, to speak, and they're just unbearably strong.

And I think it is hugely underestimated how much he was able to do as a, in a way, a poet,

a man with a very lyrical and very shy personality.

Several weeks after the premiere,

Shostakovich wrote that through the tragic conflicts and turmoil of the symphony,

he wanted optimism to assert itself as a world view.

This man conducted the premiere of the Fifth Symphony in 1937

and became the dominant force in its interpretation for the next half-century.

The chief conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, Yevgeni Mravinsky.

In the very first historical performance,

Mravinsky was somehow focused on the power and organisation and this grandness of this finale.

The power was always his strength, Mravinsky, concentration.

His face...was like...

was...

stone, in which you have this...

and his eyes, incredibly strong.

He was able to nearly paralyse orchestras.

Some people long ago called it the march of NKVD...

the finale of this symphony.

It's a very famous image.

Yeah. But then...

40 years ago, the great American musician Leonard Bernstein

played it unbelievably fast.

People were excited.

So, in no way it was played like a march, in no way it could look like a scherzo,

but it was just an unbelievable display of drive, madness and development and growth.

ENTHUSIASTIC APPLAUSE

It's a new time today, so talking about such a central...

..mainstream symphony like the Fifth,

you know, one has to find a new... way of presenting it.

# Da-a! De-de-de-da-a De-de-de-dee... #

And the moment when triplet appears should shine all the time.

It's not power I'm looking for. It's incredible precision how it speaks.

The solo itself is very, very good.

The sound comes very, very clear, but then before the climax, please watch the triplets are in good shape.

One...two...and...one...

Gergiev actually got us to play Shostakovich Five as it was written.

Normally we have to alter

quite a lot of what would appear to be written.

We have to do interpretations.

It's wonderful to be requested to play just what's written on the score.

That takes enormous confidence from a conductor.

Working with Gergiev was a unique experience and terribly exciting

because he involves the whole orchestra the whole time.

Even when you're not playing, you're part of what's going on

and he makes it so exciting by the intensity in which he provides some of the work for you to do

and by the sounds he creates.

I think in the Fifth Symphony,

excitement today in playing this symphony

is maybe more important than to try to put yourself in 1937

and imagine all these faces of NKVD men

and imagine all this grim reality.

I think, as an artist, that what we take out of it we remember,

so we have to over all, let's say, impress the public that there was a tragedy, there was a tension,

but we shouldn't really try to restore.

You understand there is a drama and you remember that.

You don't become trivial. Do not overdose with this, let's say, tragic clothes, you know.

-Sacrifices...

-One has to find a musical voice which yet brings you to the same height of expression

and to the same colour altogether, altogether.

One, two, three...

Trumpets, it will sound maybe again not exactly what Shostakovich...

He didn't put it in a diary or in a book, so he never in fact had himself do these things,

but can you play this like a rocket practically going to reach the sun?

I don't want marching on it. It has to go...shshshsh...

and it starts to burn your ear. This is the character I want.

The Fifth for me is the most Soviet of all Shostakovich's symphonies

because it was describing, it was in a way reporting to the system.

It was hiding from the system.

It was challenging the system, but it was a hidden power of Shostakovich.

He says, "I am ready to fight and I am ready to talk. You don't break me. You tried.

"I know how to deal with you. I will be a great Soviet living composer now."

And he won. He was a winner.

Subtitles on 888 by Dorothy Moore BBC Scotland 2002

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