I think the Fourth Symphony—which Shostakovich wrote after being castigated by Stalin for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and which as a result was pulled from its 1936 premiere and not performed until after Stalin’s death—might be my favorite of his symphonies. Certainly it is the first one I ever heard live, at a Russian performance in 2003, and I’ve loved it since then. But not until this April, when Vladimir Jurowski and his Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin played the Fourth on their program at the Philharmonie, did it move me so deeply that it left me trembling.
This had something to do (as usual) with the way the brilliant Jurowski had designed the evening’s program. He started with Beethoven’s Coriolan overture, a rousing piece of music that got us all in the mood, and followed that immediately with a Berlin premiere: a piano concerto, Opus 175, by the exiled Russian composer Elena Firsova, who wrote it in 2020 and saw it performed only once before, at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. In Amsterdam as in Berlin, the piano soloist was the marvelous Yefim Bronfman, and I only wish I could have been able to hear him do it twice (as Schönberg recommended we do with all new pieces of music). I felt I was barely taking in the multiple strengths and delicacies of Firsova’s concerto, as it flew off Bronfman’s fingers into the auditorium; all I could gather, that first time, was that she was indeed working in Shostakovich’s tradition of rhythmic complexity and melodic inventiveness. The whole experience was enhanced by the fact that Firsova herself was in the audience: she happened to be seated in the row just behind mine, so that after she had taken her bows, and after the intervening intermission, I got to see her being greeted and saluted by tearful young Russian girls who captured her signature on their programs and her photo in their iPhones. (It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it, when a seventy-something composer can be a culture idol for teenagers.)
Firsova politely, or perhaps eagerly, stayed for the second half of the program, which consisted entirely of Shostakovich’s Fourth. What can I say, other than that it was truly astonishing? The musicians responded to Jurowski’s dancing gestures as if they were a single large instrument emanating from his hands; their moments of speeding up and slowing down, of alternating loud blasts with mild, contemplative passages, were perfectly attuned to the demands of the piece. As the final quiet notes dwindled into the nothingness that comes at the end of this great symphony, the audience responded as it generally does if the playing is up to par: with what always seems a very long silence, and then with thunderous applause.
If the Fourth is the symphony I love best, the Twelfth may well be my favorite of his string quartets. This is a harder choice, though, because I also love the Second Quartet and the Eighth, the Third and the Fifteenth—and let’s not forget the charming Tenth and the terrific Thirteenth… But enough. The Twelfth is the one where I think he most fully demonstrates his range, going from a difficult, fraught beginning (where the second violin just sits it out for a number of measures) to a full panoply of plaintive melody, agitated rhythm, wise sadness, and dour triumph, all in the course of a half hour.
I was lucky enough to hear the Emerson Quartet play this piece last Sunday in Alice Tully Hall, during one of the final New York performances of their last season as a quartet group. Again, the program was beautifully structured and satisfyingly complete, with Ravel’s lovely quartet to start with, Webern’s Bagatelles as a palate cleanser, Bartok’s No. 2 to end the first act, and a New York premiere by Sarah Kirkland Snider just before the performance of Shostakovich’s Twelfth. Like Firsova, Snider is a worthy inheritor of the Shostakovich tradition, and like Firsova, she took her delighted bows and then stayed to hear the Master’s piece that followed hers.
I am used to the recorded Emerson version of the Twelfth (it is probably the one I played most often, when I was writing a book about Shostakovich’s quartets), but even so this performance surprised me. It had something new about it: a kind of passion mixed with longing, a sense of human limits and of the power of music to transcend them. I can’t explain how that works, the way Shostakovich’s music always translates itself directly into emotion, but I know it happens every time the quartets are beautifully played, and this was one of those times.
The Emersons closed their CMS program on Sunday with an encore by George Walker, an eminent Black composer who died in 2018, just as they opened by dedicating the evening to Menachem Pressler, who had died only the day before. Having the Shostakovich bracketed by these two deaths helped bring out his affinity for what is mortal in us—his ever-present habit, at least in the quartets, of addressing our limited time on earth. I am always aware of this when I listen to him, but this time I felt it even more so, and for that I was immensely grateful.