Symphony No. 15

It is probably a grotesque understatement to say that Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) suffered for his music. Not just the suffering of any creative artist, who struggles to transform aesthetic and technical ideas into artistic reality, who struggles to stay relevant as the world changes around him. No, Shostakovich suffered because he was a creative artist in Stalinist Russia. While not suicidal or reckless in his professional choices, he also was not one to blithely conform to official demands that he create positive, uplifting works of socialist realism. He suffered for his integrity.
The last of his many symphonies, No. 15 in A major, took shape over several weeks in 1971. Shostakovich was now nearing his end, and bouts of illness made that fact apparent to all. Battling polio, he recently enjoyed one of his healthier periods following treatments at a new orthopedic clinic. At the end of 1970 he felt renewed vigor, enough so that he began several new compositions, including this last symphony. It was written between May and July 1971, and only a few weeks later he suffered a debilitating second heart attack.
Symphony No. 15 offers a curious leave-taking of the genre that helped make Shostakovich so influential. It is many things: nostalgic, bizarre, defiant, tragi-comic. (One critic aptly describes the piece as a “circus of musical meaning, a surreal carnival where nothing is quite as it seems.”) The symphony opens with solo percussion and flute piping a typically quirky melody. The first of many quotations soon arrives, though I doubt none of the first listeners were expecting the strains of Rossini’s famous William Tell Overture to come pouring forth. Its entrance can only be even more unsettling to American audiences, who will undoubtedly have visions of the Lone Ranger riding across the stage. The entire movement parades its stop-and-start agenda as snippets of theme move continually between percussion, full strings, then brass, now solo violin, and so on. Shostakovich called this Allegro “The Toyshop.” He is clearly in a glib vein: a composer of international fame, beyond the reach of Soviet authorities, in failing health, and thus liberated to write in any manner he wishes.
The Adagio second movement turns down a more dolorous and lyric path. Its first theme, for solo cello, pays homage to the composer’s friend and stalwart champion, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Overall, Shostakovich has written a poignant meditation with touches of Wagnerian brooding in the low brass. The third movement Allegretto begins without break from the Adagio, but it goes even further in the same manner by basing large portions on quotations from Wagner’s Parsifal and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. About such passages, Shostakovich once commented, “I don’t myself quite know why the quotations are there, but I could not—could not—not include them.”

Pianist and composer Viktor Derevianko recognized the Symphony was scored in a manner apart from Shostakovich’s other large-scale orchestra works. Reduced textures, almost like chamber music, are more common than not. The writing is lean and spare. Percussion is also particularly important, from the solo glockenspiel of measure 1 to the final pages of percussion cadenza. Under the composer’s guidance, Derevianko rescored the entire piece for just piano, violin, cello, and percussion. Of course, some moments will be very different. For instance, the Adagio’s culmination for full orchestra cannot be adequately captured with reduced forces. But hearing Derevianko’s chamber version of Symphony No. 15 can be a transformative experience, bringing us even closer, even further “inside” this most confessional of Shostakovich’s late works.

(c) Jason Stell