With the Ukraine war in mind, the Northern Netherlands and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra focused these days on two different works by the Russian Shostakovich. It First Violin Concerto expresses the agony and poignant sadness that come with living in a dictatorship, where the Twelfth Symphony, nicknamed 1917, seems to be celebrating that same dehumanizing communism. The lonely man stood against the hysteria of the masses.
In Leeuwarden, violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky and conductor Antony Hermus mainly focused on the inner world of the oppressed individual, with the Noord Nederlands Orkest as the ever-present threat from outside, which settles in the bloodstream over time. In Amsterdam there was a completely different assignment for the Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. For Shostakovich was esteemed in his Twelfth Symphony – an order from the Soviet regime – to sing of the victory of the communist revolution over the tsarist empire. You hear Putin’s war rhetoric in it.
In the symphony, the composer himself seems to have comments on this victory. He does not turn the final movement ‘Dawn of mankind’ into a peaceful scene, but an outburst of violent triumphalism: the ideology screams, the human voice is lost in the chorus of the masses.
Also read this interview with Santtu-Matias Rouvali: ‘Being fin is a very strong feeling’
Fused into one sound body
With sharp accents, Rouvali gave meaning to this work, with which history has been struggling for so long. It is not without reason that the symphony was now on the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s music stands for the first time during a concert. In beautiful solos, bassoon and clarinet sometimes seemed to plead for the human dimension, but the threatening and dark choir always returned in the cellos and double basses. The clarinetist regularly needed the protection of his earplugs against the trombones behind him.
Conductor Rouvali once again showed how he can merge with the Concertgebouw Orchestra into one sound body. The gesture with his baton as he greets the audience resembles a magician’s curtsy. And that he can do magic with it, the Finn showed not only in Shostakovich, but also in the Violin Concerto by Henriëtte Bosmans and Finlandia from Sibelius. The performance was concluded by a standing orchestra with the Ukrainian national anthem that has been played in many European halls in recent days.
This also applied to De Harmonie in Leeuwarden on Thursday, where the hymn opened the concert of the Noord Nederlands Orkest. The ensemble had not fallen into the trap of canceling the Russian works from the program, as the Haarlem Philharmonic did with its Tchaikovsky&Stravinsky weekend. Both composers represent nothing that can even remotely be connected with Putin’s warmongering. Tchaikovsky’s music was even considered too Western in his day, and the idiosyncratic Stravinsky closed the door of Russia at the age of 28 and spent the remaining sixty years elsewhere, naturalized first as a Frenchman and then an American.
Shostakovich’ First Violin Concerto is, moreover, a striking embodiment of what battlefield the state terror wreaks in the human soul. Soloist Sitkovetsky and conductor Hermus sought – where possible – the inner division. The solo cadence in the final movement was heart-wrenching.
And so two orchestras showed that music from the past still has a message for the present. If you just want to listen.