On the international music scene, conductor Andris Nelsons is clearly on a roll. He has come a long way from the days when he played trumpet in the Latvian National Opera Orchestra. In the past season, he completed his contract with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) and simultaneously began his tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). His inaugural BSO concert was recently broadcast on television in PBS’s Great Performances series.
Nelsons has been celebrated in a DVD documentary entitled Genius on Fire and in recent feature articles and interviews in Gramophone and BBC Music magazines. To complete his CBSO tenure, he was given the honor of conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall in London in July. Not to be outdone, the BSO gave Nelsons the rare opportunity to conduct Gustav Mahler’s gargantuan Eighth Symphony at Tanglewood Music Center in August. When you lead Beethoven’s Ninth and Mahler’s Eighth on two different continents in the space of a few weeks, you’ve arrived as a full-fledged international jet-setting conductor.
Nelsons’s rise to prominence has been so meteoric that he was widely rumored to be next in line to become chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. When that post surprisingly went to the relatively unknown Kirill Petrenko, the BSO responded immediately by extending Nelsons’ contract for three years through 2022.
Crowning all these milestones in Nelsons’s career, he accomplished something unfortunately all too rare these days: He secured a contract with a major label to record with a major American orchestra. Over the next few years, Deutsche Grammophon (D G) will be presenting Nelsons and the BSO in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphonies 5-10.
In a gesture halfway between a marketing ploy and a political statement, D G has labeled the series “Shostakovich Under Stalin’s Shadow.” The world has generally (and unfortunately) tried to forget Joseph Stalin and his regime’s horrors. If it takes Shostakovich’s music to keep alive the memory of Stalin’s brutality, it will be profoundly ironic. Stalin did all he could to suppress Shostakovich’s music, short of killing him—and he no doubt entertained that possibility. As a mere composer, Shostakovich must have wondered how he could ever stand up to the Soviet Union’s all-powerful tyrant. I hope this doesn’t happen, but we may be approaching the point where Stalin will be remembered by the public not for the Gulag and his mass murders but for trying to silence a lone voice of dissent in Soviet music.
The first release in D G’s series highlights the Stalin versus Shostakovich conflict. It pairs his well-known Tenth Symphony with his lesser-known Passacaglia from his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. In 1936, Shostakovich was the Wunderkind of Soviet music when Stalin took an instantaneous disliking to this successful opera, which transposes the Lady Macbeth story to a Russian setting. Stalin’s displeasure resulted in an editorial in Pravda entitled “Muddle Instead of Music” that condemned the opera for its modernist dissonance.
With an official party attack on Shostakovich, his career was almost ruined. He was forced to withdraw his modernist Fourth Symphony from performance, and only in 1937 did he begin to rehabilitate his reputation with the popular triumph of his Fifth Symphony. (It is a great symphony—perhaps his greatest—but the music is more accessible to ordinary audiences and thus more in line with Soviet artistic standards.)
Stalin died in 1953 and Shostakovich soon got his revenge on the dictator with his Tenth Symphony. He found a way to give a chilling musical expression to the Great Terror Stalin perpetrated. This brooding, unnerving symphony conveys all the anxiety and fear of the Stalin years, and the frenzied, brutish second movement has been interpreted as a portrait of Stalin himself. In the third and fourth movements, Shostakovich repeatedly sounds the four notes that had become his personal musical motto. As Nelsons says in the C D booklet, “With the frantic repetition of D-S-C-H [the musical notes D, E flat, C, B] I hear Shostakovich saying to Stalin with sarcasm and irony: ‘You are dead, but I am still alive! I’m still here!’ ”
Nelsons was born in 1978 in Latvia, when it was still under the Soviet Union’s iron fist, and he claims an affinity with Shostakovich as a victim of Communist oppression. Nelsons attributes his understanding of Shostakovich’s music in its Soviet context to his “connection to the conducting tradition there in St. Petersburg, his hometown, where I studied.” Nelsons’s grasp of Shostakovich is evident throughout this impressive new CD.
Nelsons plunges right into the opening chords of the Lady Macbeth interlude, emphasizing their
cacophony as if to wake Stalin from the dead (not a great idea, come to think of it). Nelsons makes the Passacaglia sound like a proper prelude to the symphony. We can hear the way Shostakovich’s symphonic idiom developed out of all his work on operas, theater music, and movie music. He has become one of the most popular 20th-century composers because, unlike many modernists, he worked in several popular genres and thereby kept in touch with real, live audiences. How many other modernists ever supported themselves by playing piano to accompany silent movies for crowds in theaters?
When Nelsons gets to the more familiar territory of the Tenth Symphony, it is thrilling to hear Shostakovich played by one of the world’s great orchestras. The string sections are warm and rich in tone, but the cellos and basses can growl ominously when they have to. The percussion section delivers all the punch needed in the thunderous climaxes to suggest the Stalin regime’s militarism. And the wind solos—which often seem like lonely voices crying in despair—are particularly moving, with special credit going to James Sommerville on horn and William Hudgins on clarinet.
The historic recordings of Shostakovich—for example, those with the great conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic—do not always measure up to the playing standards of today’s best orchestras. The tone of the woodwinds can sound pinched and a bit sour to our ears, while the brass can be coarse. Don’t get me wrong: These are great performances, and the very rawness of the playing is appropriate. This is, after all, the orchestral sound Shostakovich heard in his head when he composed his symphonies. Moreover, conductors like Mravinsky worked directly with Shostakovich, often giving the premieres of his symphonies. Still, the BSO makes a glorious sound under Nelsons’s conducting, and it brings Shostakovich’s Tenth to new life.
In fact, the highest accolade I can pay this performance is that it combines the sheen and polish of a top American orchestra with the gutsiness of the great Russian recordings. Counting Nelsons’s, I own 12 versions of the Tenth Symphony, and I listened to all of them (sometimes repeatedly) to evaluate this new C D. Discounting the Mravinsky only because of the recording’s dull sound, I would place Nelsons’s Tenth in the top three, equal to the famous 1966 Herbert von Karajan version and surpassed only by Kirill Kondrashin’s 1973 performance with the Moscow Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra (which, truly inspired, plays well above the normal level of Russian orchestras at that time).
To capture the mood of the Stalin years, a performance of the Tenth needs to convey the brutality and savagery Shostakovich built into the music, and as powerful as Nelsons’s interpretation is, Kondrashin takes the drama to an even higher level of intensity and urgency. In Nelsons’s concern for shaping every musical phrase, he threatens at times to lose momentum, especially in the long first movement. By contrast, Kondrashin is relentless and implacable. Under his baton, the Tenth unfolds with grim determination and his performance simply has more energy than Nelsons’s.
The sheer sound of Nelsons’s C D is, of course, superior to that of Kondrashin’s—although the Melodiya recording is surprisingly good for its day. I can vouch for the sonic accuracy of D G’s recording because I was at one of the live performances last April from which this C D was put together. And before I come across as an uncritical Nelsons fan, I will add that this concert also included Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, with Christian Tetzlaff as soloist. I am sorry to report that this was one of the most disappointing performances of mainstream repertory I have ever heard from world-class musicians. Tetzlaff is one of my favorites among contemporary violinists, but on this occasion, he and Nelsons couldn’t get their act together.
The normally clear lines of the concerto were twisted and bent out of shape in a mannered performance that featured exaggerated dynamics, shifting tempi, and overaccented downbeats. I saw Nelsons conduct four concerts in the most recent winter-spring season in Boston and found him inconsistent. Judging by his performances of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, I am not convinced that he has mastered the classical mainstream—although at times, particularly in the Haydn Ninetieth Symphony, he caught the music’s spirit, both its elegance and humor.
Fortunately for his career, Nelsons excels in the kind of blockbuster pieces that allow a great orchestra to strut its stuff. In addition to the Shostakovich Tenth, I heard him conduct Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and Richard Strauss’s grandiose tone poem Ein Heldenleben. Nelsons always managed to make the big moments in these pieces come off splendidly, but in the Mahler symphony, he had not fully worked out its overall musical logic. The orchestra played individual moments masterfully, with careful attention to the phrasing, but Nelsons did not seem capable of maintaining the long line and making whole movements cohere the way the great Mahler conductors such as Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Jascha Horenstein, and Leonard Bernstein could.
The Heldenleben was more successful, but even here, Nelsons sometimes lingered too lovingly over individual details. Still, when he got to the last section, “The Hero’s Retreat from the World and Fulfillment,” he got the BSO to produce the most beautiful string tone I have ever heard live—heartbreakingly, gut-wrenchingly, bloodcurdlingly beautiful. For a few moments the notes just seemed to float in the air, suspended in time, so enthralling was the music.
I’d rather have an uneven conductor than one who performs all music at a steady level of mere competence. Andris Nelsons may have botched the Beethoven Violin Concerto, but he also revealed depths I had never heard in Ein Heldenleben. So, even with my doubts, I came away from his first season believing that the BSO had made a wise choice. Boston audiences certainly think so. On several occasions, I heard patrons after the concerts say knowingly: “We’ve got our conductor.” What is more, the BSO musicians seem willing to play their hearts out for Nelsons. After the performance of the Shostakovich Passacaglia, I noticed Jules Eskin beaming with delight. Eskin has been first cellist with the BSO for over 50 years, and at 84, he still plays with boyish enthusiasm. The smile on his face seemed his way of saying of the rarely performed Passacaglia: “Look what I just learned to play.”
Nelsons seems to have what great conductors need: the ability to inspire musicians and lead them into new territory, whether of repertory or interpretation. He has already proven himself a champion of some of the most challenging musical masterpieces, from Strauss to Shostakovich. He has Shostakovich’s Fifth, Eighth, and Ninth symphonies scheduled for the upcoming BSO season. Boston audiences are in for a treat, as we all are once D G releases these recordings. The series is scheduled to be fully issued by summer 2017.
Who knows what musical heights Nelsons will have scaled by then? In the meantime—Berliners, eat your hearts out.
Paul A. Cantor, the Clifton Waller Barrett professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author, most recently, of The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV.
