BBC National Orchestra of Wales BBC Proms

Welcome to the revolution. On this week's 20th Century Classics at the Proms,

music that's played a starring role in one of the

world's biggest political and ideological conflicts -

works by Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich -

Soviet composers.

They're both masterpieces that say and mean different things -

sometimes flat-out contradictory things -

all at the same time.

And they both sound the eternal truth behind all revolutions -

whether they're social, ideological or musical.

That it's all just a bit of history repeating -

sometimes victoriously, sometimes vainly,

but always, in Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto and

Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony,

music of shattering, moving, inescapable power.

In around half an hour or so, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales

and their Chief Conductor, Thomas Sondergard,

will launch themselves at the

huge historical canvas of Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony -

The Year 1905.

But we start with Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto.

This is a work written in 1935 in Western Europe, but full of longing

and nostalgia for the Russian motherland where Prokofiev would

permanently return the following year.

But by that stage,

Prokofiev was a completely different composer from the iconoclastic,

dissonance-loving firebrand he'd been when he'd left Russia

soon after the revolution of 1917 to pursue his career abroad.

In fact, his biggest project of 1935 was a ballet,

Romeo and Juliet, that's chock-full of unforgettable tunes

composed because Prokofiev wanted them to go straight

to the hearts of his listeners.

Then, as now, where would Lord Sugar and all of those apprentices be

were it not for the Dance Of The Knights from Romeo and Juliet?

MUSIC: "Dance Of The Knights" by Sergei Prokofiev

This was an aesthetic that fitted with the diktats

of Stalin's Soviet Realism and in fact, Prokofiev himself

wrote an essay in 1934 in which he said that truly great Soviet music

"ought to correspond, both in form and in content,

"to the grandeur of the epoch."

It would also, abroad, "reveal our true selves."

The music ought to be primarily melodious

and should express a new kind of simplicity.

Of course, Prokofiev was returning to Russia

straight into the grimmest years of Stalin's regime

where he, like everyone else, would have to dodge ideological bullets.

But if you hear the sunniness of the melodies in the

Second Violin Concerto, it is as if

all of that historical context disappears.

This is music, like Romeo and Juliet,

that's once heard, never forgotten.

Whether it's the sinewy melody that the work starts with,

the energy of the finale or, especially,

the toy-like, central slow movement -

pizzicato strings, interjections from bassoons,

clarinet and then, for the soloist, one of the most simple,

heartfelt melodies that any 20th-century composer ever imagined.

APPLAUSE

Here at the Proms then - British violinist Daniel Hope

is the soloist at the Royal Albert Hall

and Thomas Sondergard conducts the BBC National Orchestra of Wales

in Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto.

APPLAUSE

Sergei Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto at the Proms.

Daniel Hope was the soloist at the Royal Albert Hall.

And the BBC National Orchestra of Wales was

conducted by Thomas Sondergard.

Despite Prokofiev's embrace of melody and simplicity in that piece,

more than a decade after the premiere of

The Second Violin Concerto, he was to fall foul

of a Communist Party decree condemning formalism in music.

Poignantly, Prokofiev died on the very same day that Stalin's

death was announced, in March 1953.

Back at the time of Prokofiev's return to the USSR in 1936,

Dmitri Shostakovich, a generation younger and, until then, wunderkind

of the communist regime, had suddenly become persona non grata.

Stalin himself had attended Shostakovich's opera

Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk, and subsequently the piece

was denounced as "muddle instead of music."

Two decades later, in 1957,

a year after Khrushchev had given a speech denouncing Stalin's legacy

and heralding a period of relative cultural freedom,

Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony premiered in Moscow.

Now this is the piece written on a precipice of music,

political and poetic meaning. Its subtitle, The Year 1905,

suggests that it's a programmatic or even cinematic

recreation of the 9th January 1905,

when a peaceful demonstration of 150,000 people,

outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg,

was murderously crushed by the Tsar's Cossacks.

And these are events that the Shostakovich family knew well.

Shostakovich's father was there in the crowd that day,

a year before his son was born.

And the young Dmitri grew up with stories of what the Russians

call Bloody Sunday.

Shostakovich quotes and uses folk tunes

and revolutionary songs to give voice to the people's struggle.

In the first movement, you'll hear the melodies of two prison songs,

both bleak emblems of incarceration.

The second movement depicts the massacre itself.

And it ends with one of the most startling sound images that

Shostakovich ever imagined from an orchestra.

After the rifles, a violent hammering of brass

and percussion into the crowd, Shostakovich suddenly jump cuts

to a scene of utter emptiness and desolation.

Ghostly high strings and celesta.

A version of the music we heard right at the start of the symphony.

But now, the square, snow-covered, is littered with bodies.

The third movement is an in memoriam, an adagio slow movement.

And the final movement,

which includes the melody Rage You Tyrants,

ends with the tumultuous and apparently victorious

pealing of bells and a violent onslaught of percussion.

Surely the people's onward march to freedom

away from the shackles of the oppressor.

But which oppressor? The Tsar or Soviet regime?

For some in the audience, the references weren't just about 1905

but about what had happened the year before, 1956,

when the Soviet regime had brutally put down the Hungarian uprising.

Lev Lebedinsky, the musicologist, was quite clear.

The Eleventh Symphony was a thoroughly contemporary work,

he said, camouflaged out of necessity with an historic programme.

Camouflaged so successfully that the symphony won a Lenin Prize.

And other music lovers heard in it only empty

quotations of revolutionary songs.

He sold himself down the river, they said about Shostakovich,

to please the regime.

Shostakovich himself is on record saying that

patriotism is a noble goal for music.

Here he is in 1974, along with his son, the conductor Maxim.

When a person listens to this kind of music,

naturally it plunges him into the world of this composer.

A composer who has something to say.

He goes away, becoming, as it were, a participant in the experience

which the composer wishes to put over in the work in question.

HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN

This would indicate that I have succeeded,

to some extent, in portraying patriotism in my music.

Which is, has been and always will be my aim.

For no musical work can exist without it.

Beethoven, for example,

could hardly have written his great symphonies unless he'd had

patriotism, unless he'd had progressive thoughts and opinions.

Or for that matter, Schubert, Schumann,

Mussorgsky, Glinka, Tchaikovsky.

Whether a composer always succeeds in speaking in the name

of his people, I'm not sure.

But I personally always strive to do so.

I think a composer must.

I do think my duty is to speak for the people.

Shostakovich's music speaks to people in many different ways.

In September of 1957, his friend, the great poet Anna Akhmatova,

wrote a poem called Music.

WOMAN READS RUSSIAN POEM

It shines with a miraculous light

Revealing to the eye the cutting of facets

It alone speaks to me

When others are too scared to come near

When the last friend turned his back

It was with me in my grave

As if a thunderstorm sang

Or all the flowers spoke.

Music, Shostakovich's music,

is both revelation and consolation for Akhmatova.

Listeners like her heard in it a kind of emotional

truth-telling during the Soviet regime

that words just couldn't dare to achieve

on so public a scale as big new symphony.

And after the premiere of the Eleventh Symphony,

just a month after writing that poem,

Akhmatova knew what the symphony meant to her.

Those songs, she said,

were like white birds flying against a terrible black sky.

MUSIC: "The Eleventh Symphony" by Dmitri Shostakovich

APPLAUSE

Here is Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony (The Year 1905) at the Proms.

Thomas Sondergard conducts the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

You can follow my Twitter guide to the symphony

alongside the performance - #shostakovich @bbcproms.

MUSIC: "The Eleventh Symphony (The Year 1905)" by Dmitri Shostakovich

WILD APPLAUSE

CHEERING

Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony (The Year 1905) at the Proms.

Thomas Sondergard conducted the BBC National Orchestra of Wales

at the Royal Albert Hall.

Shostakovich was quoted as saying,

"I wanted to show this recurrence, that many things repeat

"themselves in Russian history, in the Eleventh Symphony.

"I wrote it in 1957 and it deals with contemporary themes,

"even though it's called 1905.

"It's about the people who have stopped believing

"because the cup of evil has run over."

You don't have to look far to see that cycle of revolutionary

history repeating itself again and again.

Shostakovich's symphony never stops resonating.

Just like those heroic bells that chime violently

against tyranny at the end of the final movement.

APPLAUSE CONTINUES

That's all for this Sunday.

Every Prom is live on BBC Radio Three.

The next televised Prom is on Thursday on BBC Four,

bringing us Berlioz and Beethoven.

I'm back in a fortnight on BBC Four with the 21st century at this

year's Proms - celebrating the very newest possible music -

from the Royal Albert Hall.

Joy boxes, turning points, dance suites and even Doctor Who -

they'll all be here in a fortnight. Nostrovia.

MUSIC: "Kalinka" by Balalaika Ensemble Wolga

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd