Shostakovich’s first at 100 – how amazing art sounded before Stalin banned | Classical music

Tthis week we commemorate 100 wonderful years. Sir David Attenborough‘s, of course, but just four days after the birth of the real treasure of the world, Dmitri Shostakovich’s First Symphony also began to see the light of day – it began in Leningrad on 12 May 1926. The 19-year-old record was played by the Leningrad Philharmonic, conducted by Nicolai Malko.

The symphony’s four-movement structure is the only constant it has. The young Shostakovich learned all the lessons he could about what orchestral music should sound like and how it should sound, and he had the courage to break all those ideas and send them out. There is no precedent for previous generations of Russian musicians and orchestral pioneers; instead, Shostakovich’s First resounds with confidence that everything is optimistic and deliciously sardonic.

From the disjointed trumpet blast that opens the work – the pride that thumbs its nose at your expectations of how a symphony should begin; Not a definite development, but an obvious question – Shostakovich begins first walk which is like a circus: a group of people on a stage that comes and goes, usually accompanied by a cartoon bear, a play or a bassoon. The speed that Shostakovich creates from the way he expresses ideas – cutting from one to the next as if the symphony is a film – continues happily. secondary movements. Here, a piano part is added to the orchestral parts, and this is where one of the secrets of the song’s power is revealed. As a teenager, Shostakovich played the piano for Soviet silent films, and in the symphony’s piano solo, he transforms his work into a broken song that Buster Keaton would be proud of.

The movement reaches its most terrifying climax – a sudden euphoria that destroys the entire orchestra – and washes out, as if the pianist is unable to keep up with the tempo of the music.

There is no sense anywhere in this piece of bombast and post-painting ideas of Shostakovich’s later symphonies, but there is a real feeling here, which is expressed in the climax of the scherzo, where the composition is suddenly shaken into real life. The slow motion that comes after is one of Shostakovich’s most passionate compositions, as a solo oboe and solo cello inspires the entire orchestra to sing songs that sound more like Shakespearean drama than circus hijinks.

The last move somehow it brings all these worlds together, and the symphony ends in a stream of irresistible energy, the culmination of idealism and pure joy. This is, of course, the most confident First Symphony by any composer in the history of music (and there are many competitors, from Mendelssohn to Knussen, from Rihm to Schubert). It heralds a world of possibilities where musicals are joyfully translated into the joys of modern music that are both funny and serious. It is a unique sound of the symphonic avant garde that would herald an era of unlimited freedom for Shostakovich and generations of composers.

In fact, this is what it sounds like, about Shostakovich and Russia. In Shostakovich’s later symphonies, especially from the mid-1930s onwardsyou feel the passion of that freedom and the daily fear of living in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The confidence and joy in his genius that you hear in every page of the First Symphony is a miracle that Shostakovich has never repeated and is still fresh, a century later.

This week, Tom has been listening to: Elgar’s Viola Concerto. Yes, seriously: in the viola player Timothy Ridout’s elaborate recording of Lionel Tertis’s version of Elgar’s Cello Concerto – an arrangement that Elgar accepted and performed with Tertis as a soloist – the spirit of the music is more vivid than before, with a kind of humanity and a dangerous vulnerability of the world.