One more... one of the reasons for my Shostakovich 5 obsession: my famed Bubbie, it was her favorite piece. She claims she heard the premiere on the radio, though I'm pretty sure what she heard was Toscanini's premiere of Shostakovich 7.
But what saddens me about Shostakovich 5 is how domesticated it's become. Everybody talks abaout how the ending used to be played too quickly, but as I've complained before, it's not just the ending, it's basically the whole thing. This piece is played much too often, and it's usually played like a 'normal symphony.' It basically his only symphony with the appearance of a four-movement classical symphony, and it's usually played with tempos that cram it into the format of Beethoven and Brahms, which is plenty exciting, but makes everybody forget that it's a massively tragic work. Not just terrifying, which it absolutely is and should be, but sad. It bears witness, and it's usually played for fireworks.
I'm sure all of you are thinking that Bernstein started this tradition. He didn't. Outside his famous quick ending, he's often slower than average. Mravinsky did. Mravinsky, Kondrashin, Dmitrev, Gauk, Jansons pere, even young Jansons, they simply breeze through the thing as though it's Beethoven's 5th. You can't call someting as terrifying as how they play it superficial, but it gave the sanction for later conductors to basically play it as a virtuoso exercise. Do we really need to hear it take barely forty minutes?
Take the opening, the first half of the opening is, I'm pretty sure, a depiction of depression, the kind of depression you'd feel if Stalin just pronounced a near-death sentence on you in public. It's the inability to get out of bed in the morning, the sighs, the moans, the attempts at revving up self-confidence, the slowness at completing chores, the inability to do anything, and, of course, the erotic daydreaming, the weird sexy dance in the middle which quotes Carmen.
So how do we usually hear it? We usually hear it played as though they just have to get through it to get to the fireworks in the second half of the movement. Conductors don't have to play it completely in tempo, it's basically one long recitative, and you can do all kinds of tempo variations in it. Temirkanov was an absolute master at that (not his CD, later performances like the St. Petersburg broadcast and the live version I heard from him in 2006). Sanderling played it completely metrically, but it was just as good. The Russians who should be custodians of the tradition on the other hand? It was just six minutes of vamping.
Then comes the second half, which everybody waits for. It's supposed to be a gradual acceleration. Does it have to be? Of course not: a guest conductor would spend all rehearsal coordinating it when he otherwise can concentrate on actual details. But it does have to give the sense that the protagonist is getting up and beginning to go about the day out of sheer terror. We of course know about the march at the end of that passage (redolent of Mahler 3's two colliding marches), but shouldn't there at least be parts of it at march tempo rather than the roller coaster ride we often hear? The presence of death or murder has to be there in this music.
As for the Largo, I think it's the first in Shostakovich's many depictions of sleepless nights. His children are in bed, at times he imagines their terror, at times he remembers friends who are gone, at times he remembers lost loves, at times he watches nature itself: wind, cold, birds, and of course, there is that B-Flat minor to D-minor panic attack.
As for the finale, well, we know about the ending... but before that. I have always thought it was a depiction of a riot at an official demonstration. Again, in a normal rehearsal period, it is too much to ask for a conductor (at least a guest) to coordinate that when so much else needs coordination, but it's absolutely necessary to get the true feeling of this movement. It's not just shock and adrenaline (though of course it's both), it's the bombast of a May Day parade, followed by rage, maybe dissident speeches, and all the while the music gets faster and faster as though you feel the rage rising in the spectators. Finally you get to the moment they take action, and as it keeps getting faster, it inevitably sounds like running, confusion, followed by the passionate singing of a revolutionary anthem in A-Major, followed by machine gun fire.
When the protagonist is captured, we hear something that sounds like the same revolutionary song, but it sounds almost like officials reading the song as an accusation, followed by beating and torture, until we get to that ending...
Who gives the appearance of all of it? Well... absolutely nobody. Mark Wigglesworth comes close, he seems to follow the score marking for marking until the very last minute when he shocks you by taking the ending at a near-Bernstein clip. Temirkanov's video broadcast is truly wonderful in many parts, but the Largo is entirely too fast to bring out tears and terror. It takes a level of chutzpah and demands to do all this the way the score specifies and very few people are willing to do anything even close to it. Fireworks are so much easier in this noisy piece that can always be counted on to get audiences to their feet.
Shostakovich 5, like most Shostakovich, is better than it can be performed, and it's absolutely inexhaustible. Even the always lauded greats in this piece: Mravinsky, Bernstein, Haitink, Sanderling, Maxim perhaps, don't get even close to the real truth of the work. Wigglesworth came so close, but however good, it's not like he had an orchestra worthy of Shostakovich in Cardiff. We're still waiting: maybe KP or VJ can do it, but the true nature of the piece still eludes us.
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