Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is a multi-dimensional work of drama, extraordinary depth, and defiance. Making their Scottish debut, and marking their 20th anniversary, Aurora Orchestra unpacks the piece over the course of an afternoon, to an audience relaxing comfortably on colourful beanbags, in a display of what makes Edinburgh’s International Festival so good and right.
Two things in particular mark the Orchestra’s fresh approach. Firstly, most of its players are placed among the audience in the auditorium: I was sitting next to a violinist to begin with, later a viola player. Secondly, the musicians are playing entirely from memory, rather than concentrating on sheet music, making for a much more expansive and open presentation than the traditional audience-players dialogue – they don’t look down, but instead look round a lot, with friendly smiles, at each other and at the audience. It’s an intimate and immersive setting, and very agreeable.
Aurora’s founder-conductor Nicholas Collon stands in the middle of the audience/orchestra, and explains each section of the piece, sharing insights into its historic and political background, and examining its emotional depth. Some short sections are played for illustration, then played fully-incorporated into each movement. He warns those sitting near the brass section that it might get a little loud shortly. And the piece is a paragon of ebbing and flowing tension and relaxation, softness and brazen bellowing.
It was composed in 1937, following Stalin’s attendance the previous year at a performance at Moscow’s Bolshoi of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. A review in the regime-mouthpiece Pravda, likely sanctioned by Stalin himself, was scathing of its brash modernism, referring to it as ‘coarse, primitive, and vulgar’, ‘a muddle of music’, chillingly warning that Shostakovich’s next symphony had better be pleasing to the Soviet regime: ‘This is a game’, it said, ‘…that may end very badly.’ Quite what kind of colourful nosegay of sweetness the Soviet leader would have expected, from a ballet about cold-blooded treasonous murder, is not known. Given that during the Stalinist purges 7 million people were either disappeared to labour camps or simply executed, Shostakovich knew what Pravda‘s threat could mean to him, his friends and family. It would not be the first time that decade that those seeking to control the population sought also to control the arts.
So this piece is a balancing-act – both a response to Stalin’s censorious cruelty, and a show of the composer’s defiant desire to remain at the forefront of the modern music movement. Soviet pride is expressed in a proud militaristic march, folk song is referenced in melody, and the Largo section of the work is beautifully rich, with an almost tearful emotional complexity, matching its musical innovation. Occasional touches, it has been argued, suggest tongue-in-cheek musical jokes designed to prickle against the regime.
The concert that was to follow that evening in the Usher Hall, playing the entire piece will of course have been spectacularly good; but the audience of the afternoon’s Beanbag Concert will arguably have learnt a lot more than their crepuscular counterparts, leaving with their curiosity, as well as their desire for dazzling orchestral music, satisfied.
Many of Shostakovich’s later symphonies received their premiere at Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, in the former East Germany. You can read more about the venue in my piece about the city.
