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 SHOSTAKOVICH'S ENIGMATIC FAREWELL SYMPHONY

CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★

Winston Churchill famously said that, "Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Add the adjectives 'comic', 'wistful' and 'sly' to that quotation and you would have a pretty good description of Shostakovich's Symphony No.15. Shostakovich spent most of his career in a cat-and-mouse game with the Soviet government's cultural commissars: feted and awarded medals for symphonies seen as suitably patriotic at other times publicly vilified for "formalism" the catch-all term for anything - complexity, ambiguity, dissonance, pessimism - they found suspect. Little wonder that his music exploited, "a teasing and often powerfully affective emotional ambivalence", as the music critic Bernard Jacobson termed it. So much so, I suspect, that even Shostakovich wasn't always sure when it applied. Take the musical quotation of Rossini's 'William Tell' overture, which occurs five times in the symphony's first movement. It's a joke obviously, a witty leg-pull, and appreciated as such by the audience, who greeted the movement's close with a wave of chuckling in this alternately bracing and pensively moving performance under Osmo Vänskä. But what of the later quotations from Wagner's 'Ring' and 'Tristan'? The composer himself admitted, "They ask me why, why did you do that? I don't know, I don't really know, it just seemed to be necessary," Forget treating the symphony as a code to be cracked and relish its musical joys, emotional richness and the dexterity with which Shostakovich wields his orchestral forces, especially the panoply of percussion with four players utilizing (amongst many others) xylophone, vibraphone, castanets, whip and a hypnotically repetitive woodblock. Vänskä, all concentration and no showboating, is a former orchestral clarinettist who allows the players freedom of expression when Shostakovich gives them ample opportunity. In the second movement Eduardo Vassallo's cello sang out a mournful lament and Marie-Christine Zupancic and Veronika Klirova's flutes heralded a funeral march. Elsewhere Eugene Tzikindelean's solo brought the village folk fiddler to life and when Nikolaj Henriques and Tony Liu's bassoons launch the third movement Scherzo, Shostakovich gives them an antique gruff sound like ancient dulcians. The symphony begins with a chiming glockenspiel, music box style, a magical opening for a musical daydream, a lantern show as the mortally ill composer - who died three years after the 1972 premiere - lets his imagination roam free. The CBSO and Vänskä opened up this box of delights replete with both elan and poignancy.

Vänskä is arguably the world's finest Sibelius conductor - I saw his revelatory performance of the early 'Kullervo' symphony in this hall with the Lahti orchestra - so the concert began in fine style with a rousing 'Karelia Suite'. The horn section sounded a mite tentative at the start but once underway the CBSO sent the troops galloping off in swaggering style, the central Intermezzo delicate and hushed and the final Alla Marcia joyfully vigorous with the brass section resplendent. The miniature tone poem 'The Bard' featured that most bardic of instruments the harp, conjuring up the age of chivalry and heroism. The concert's revelation came with a selection of Sibelius's songs performed by Finnish soprano Helena Juntunen who was absolutely stunning. She was chafing her hands as she came on stage but not, as I first thought, because of the freezing temperature or the daring cut of her chic cream evening gown. When the elegiac 'Autumn Evening' started I realized that this had been part of Juntunen's warm-up routine. She is an intensely physical artist not so much singing the song as channeling it, viscerally engaged in expressing its meaning: the frozen landscape, the desolate bird cries, the shivering fall of leaves were all presented to us, as was the melancholia of the eponymous 'Count Magnus', and the seductive voices of the mermaids that console him. The extrovert  'Spring is Flying' was a burst of sunlight with Juntunen's closing appeal to "Let us love now, let us kiss now", irresistible. Her dramatic skills were matched by a voice both beautiful, capable of creamy texture and cutting edge, and powerful. All these are necessary for Sibelius's demanding 'Luonnotar', a ten-minute vocal tour-de-force. Juntunen swapped the evening gown for traditional Finnish folk costume as befitting a song depicting the mythical Daughter of Air who becomes Mother of the Water and whose actions help create the Earth. Juntunen captured the despair, existential isolation and rapture of Luonnotar, her voice soaring and dipping like the seabird whose cries she depicts so vividly. A performance to cherish.

Norman Stinchcombe

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