SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

'Inside the Music': Shostakovich: Symphony No. 4: Andrey Boreyko (conductor), Gerard McBurney (narrator and creative director), F. Murray Abraham (actor), New York Philharmonic, Avery Fisher Hall, 14.12.2007 (BH)

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Op. 43 (1935-36)


Coming hot on the heels of Gustavo Dudamel, but perhaps without his massive public relations machine, conductor Andrey Boreyko made a stunning debut with the New York Philharmonic.  This was not only an incisive reading of the Shostakovich Fourth Symphony, but one of the most towering of any Shostakovich symphony I have ever heard.  Moreover, in the beautifully conceived hour prior to intermission, Gerard McBurney and actor F. Murray Abraham (positioned at microphones on either side of Boreyko), narrated history, background and context, in a model of what these types of lecture-demonstrations should be.  Without a single technical glitch, the two narrators alternated, delivering factual material while sober documentary footage appeared onscreen above.  The film was further punctuated with musical excerpts from the Fourth delivered with spot-on timing by Boreyko and the orchestra.

About the same time period as the Fourth’s completion in 1936, the composer’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was also criticized for its “coarseness and vulgarity,” causing the composer to withdraw the symphony.  Thankfully he merely shelved it and quietly returned now and then to make changes.  Yet after the work’s premiere in 1961, Shostakovich (and some Western critics) thought it might be better than any of the symphonies that followed.  Certainly what followed after intermission made a powerful argument for the Fourth as the most structurally unpredictable and imaginative, filled with ambiguity and restlessness, and an explosive use of massive orchestral forces.

Boreyko seems to know this piece inside and out.  In the first movement, sections played at a thrillingly loud volume contrasted with small harp accents, with the conductor sometimes standing stock-still, fluttering his fingertips or urging the ensemble with a slight shrug.  I couldn’t help but think of Boulez, whose elegant podium demeanor is sometimes disproportionate to the torrents of freezing sleet and rain he can produce.  The last ten minutes were almost unbearably tense, and for the first time in awhile, I was glad for a short break to exhale.  The second movement, marked moderato con moto, tries desperately to be something other than sad, but in context and harking back to the depressing history earlier in the evening, it emerged as just sweepingly sad.  In the final few minutes, cleanly cued by Boreyko’s tiny motions, the orchestra was particularly mesmerizing in an austere coda of woodwind transparencies and gently clicking percussion.

The blistering finale was notable for its detailed sense of phrasing, each line arching into the next with the occasional grotesque interruption.  Alternately stirring and frightening, vulgar and inspiring, the mood changes are more Mahlerian than usual, even for this composer.  And the enigmatic ending was one I couldn’t get out of my head for days.  Does it spell hope, or does it conceal, not wanting the authorities to know that anyone is even thinking of hope?  Part of the brilliance of Boreyko’s interpretation is that he left it for us to decide.


Bruce Hodges