Shostakovich Symphonies 4, 5 & 6 album review – Gramophone “Editor’s Choice”
“What we have here is a telling snapshot of Shostakovich’s symphonic journey with all its socio-political implications. With the Fourth Symphony we tread the path he might have taken, with the Fifth we glimpse apparent compliance with a nod to the great Tchaikovsky, and the Sixth is flat-out wilful deception. He’d learned to work the Soviet system.
“This has to be the best-sounding Fourth on disc – a vivid sense of acoustic and scale but with thrilling immediacy, too. It’s a myth that this piece is shapeless and undisciplined. Shostakovich’s first movement takes sonata form to the edge and back and does so with an audacity (and beauty) that tweaks our curiosity as to where he might have gone next had Stalin and his minions not intervened. It could be that this was his path to learning that less is more – but for now more is more and it makes for a sensational ride. Klaus Mäkelä unpicks the method in the madness of this music conscious at all times of how he might best address, indeed push, its extremes. There’s a darkly lyric passage at the heart of the first movement which is etched in with real poetry by conductor and orchestra – Mariss Jansons will undoubtedly have taught the marvellous Oslo Philharmonic a thing or two about the pitching of this music – and yet the brutalist aspects of the piece pull no punches. The mad string fugue prior to the recapitulation is breakneck to the point of insanity, the climax a kind of ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’ moment.
“Mäkelä catches the wit and irony, too: the ‘ticking’ percussion wrapping up the stealthy Scherzo will be quoted in later works like a chuckle of defiance; the balletic flashes of Petrushka in the finale (the Oslo bassoons are complete stars) seem innocent and yet so knowing in the context of so much grimness. The dramatic ostinato which generates that final climax is dissonant with fake triumphalism.
“Having recently delivered a comparative review of the Fifth on BBC Radio 3 I am confident in saying that Mäkelä’s account would certainly have made the shortlist without unseating my final choices. In this the most familiar of the symphonies the stakes need to go up a notch or two for any performance to stand out from the crowd. Mäkelä is at his best in the first two movements. He is super-mindful of the transformations of material taking place in the first, the peaceful and remote turning nasty in the frog-marching development. The Scherzo has terrific bite and a Mahlerian ungainliness, the cheapness of the Trio replete with Viennese hesitations. But I like even more breadth (à la Bernstein and Previn) in the luminous slow movement notwithstanding some very lovely string-playing, the final pages invoking the spirit of Tchaikovsky in hushed reverence. Mäkelä doesn’t labour the hollow victory of the finale’s final pages but maybe, just maybe, the polish and precision of the playing precludes their implicit vulgarity.
“The Sixth is marvellous. Mäkelä would have us believe (as did Shostakovich) that the first movement portends a deeply serious piece. The projected ‘Lenin’ Symphony? Well, that was the rumour the composer didn’t seek to deny. The opening Largo is gravely expansive here, Mäkelä laying on the intensity and spinning out those long orations from cor anglais and flute, then that marvellous moment where the violins are taken into the stratosphere as the proverbial bell tolls from below.
“Then come the two circus turns. The playing is terrifically virtuosic, keen and propulsive in rhythm – so exciting – and Mäkelä makes the appropriate distinction between the second-movement Allegro and the finale’s riotous Presto. There is no escaping the vulgarity now. Presumably we are getting the other symphonies? If so – auspicious and sonically outstanding.”
Gramophone, Edward Seckerson, Awards Issue, October 2024
