A post-rock lover’s guide to classical music: Russian cycles, part 2

Dmitri Shostakovitch, Symphony no.5

[apologies for the lack of excerpt to download this week...I should be reunited with my CD collection once I reach Toronto!]

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I never really got into the Smiths. Maybe it was a variety of factors, but even when I started reading about how influential they had been to a whole lot of bands I was really into growing up, I still somehow failed to see the reason behind the reverence. Things would have been different, I’m sure, if I had been just a few years older and able to discover them right from the start. Or maybe, they would still have sounded just too…twee, perhaps? But being among a group of friends who were worshipping Morrissey in High School and College meant that I had to keep some thoughts for myself…

Until Southpaw Grammar. Now, there was something that Morrissey was doing right! Even though some of his ardent supporters were criticizing the album for being too heavy, textured, and prog (and God knows you don’t want to be labelled prog in certain indie circles…), his music was leading toward a new direction. And there was that formidably ominous opener, The teachers are afraid of the pupils, with its hypnotic orchestral sample backed by a simple tambourine loop. A simple motif, 4 notes in a rising/falling pattern, that keeps repeating throughout the song for over 11 minutes.

I wondered where that sample might have come from for the whole summer of ‘95. A few weeks later I stumbled upon Shostakovitch’s fifth.
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Artists often produce contrasting works about their native countries. Their ambiguities, their questionings and criticisms are met with some instinctual attachment to the land of their ancestors, the land they still love in spite of what History may have to say. They are no different from the other citizens, they just articulate the dichotomy more eloquently perhaps. And Shostakovitch’s entire body of work can be seen as a musical documentary on Soviet Russia, the rise and fall of Stalinism, and a tentative, timid opening to the West. He kept working on those themes throughout his life (another entry mentions this, if you missed it), but the Fifth Symphony marks a pivotal moment in his career.

After a few daring pieces in the early 1930s, Party members and dignitaries expressed their concern about Shostakovitch’s controversial musical language. This was a time of increased paranoia, cultural realignment, and state-sponsored purges. Artists, of course, were not spared, and Shostakovitch himself had been warned: he had to come up with something that would please the Party.
When the Fifth came out in 1937, it was an immediate critical and popular success. And yet, the opening sequence is hardly an optimistic or bombastic introduction in the vein of military marches, far from it. The motif that Morrissey sampled lies ambiguously between major and minor, an unresolved musical phrase that leaves the listener in a state of unease.
Perhaps the most obviously Soviet part of the symphony is its second movement. It is also its shortest act, and it is punctuated by a certain pungent irony, something that was shared by Prokofiev as well in most of his works. Hardly what you would call program music, or tone poem in dedication to the greatness of Stalin. But the leaders were happy with it.

What about the popular acclaim? The greatness of Shostakovitch lies in the fact that he offers no easy answers in his music: his ambiguity reflects the listener’s psyche, and what was hailed as one of the great musical works of Communist culture by some was also considered as a subtle criticism of Stalinism and its excesses by others. Listen to the mournful third movement and you might see it this way too. What are we celebrating here? Aren’t we rather mourning the countless victims of Stalin’s paranoia instead?

Perhaps the key to the success of Shostakovitch’s Fifth lies also in its accessibility. The melodic passages are clear and well-defined, the orchestration is powerful without being bombastic, and the narrative keeps going forward. Shostakovitch would eventually become more ambitious in his symphonic scope in the next two decades, but the blueprint is right here. A musical universe that is rich and complex, multifaceted and profound.

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The Fifth is arguably one of Shostakovitch’s most popular works. I grew up listening to the Bernstein version highlighted by the NPR clip, which had been approved by the composer himself. Interest in the Rusian composer has not waned over the years, and he is featured among every important conductor’s list of recordings. Sir Georg Solti and Yevgeny Mravinsky both released essential versions of most (if not all) his symphonies,
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The young LA Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel is going from strength to strength, and in the following videos you can easily see why. This was recorded in Italy with the Isreal Philharmonic Orchestra in 2006, when he was only 25.