The Classical Review

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is on a roll. After Manfred Honeck’s inspirational program of Beethoven and Haydn last week, another local podium favorite, Jakub Hrůša, has returned to lead the CSO in a Russian program. And Thursday night’s remarkable performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 provided not just a highlight of this season but one of the finest CSO nights of recent years.

Most of Dmitri Shostakovich’s “public” works—those written as a kind of artistic Communist Party dues paying to keep favor with Stalin and the Soviet cultural apparatchiks—are not among his most timeless efforts. That includes the symphonies Nos. 2, 3, 12 and the once-lauded No. 7, as well as more literal paeans to the regime like the choral Song of the Forests. 

Outwardly, Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony would seem to count among that group. Subtitled “The Year 1905,” the symphony recounts the events of the “First Russian Revolution.” The programmatic movements chart the events of “Bloody Sunday,” when the Czar’s troops fired upon demonstrators, killing a hundred and wounding three times as many. That incident served to further inflame ant-Czarist feelings and ultimately lead to the overthrow of the government in 1917.

Laid out in four connected movements, the Eleventh, unusually for Shostakovich, draws upon several revolutionary songs and communist odes, as detailed in Gerard McBurney’s excellent program note. Yet while the music may indeed depict these historical events, the symphony is grander and yet more layered and complex than mere agitprop tub-thumping.

Hrůša led the CSO in a powerful, riveting performance that maintained laser-like concentration and intensity for the hour-plus duration, from the somber quiet opening to the final ambivalent chimes fading away to silence at the coda.

In the opening movement (“The Palace Square”) the sense of ominous anticipation was manifest, in a vast, brooding Adagio that conveys the feeling of a gathering storm with isolated solo trumpet and horn fanfares. The music begins to rouse itself and accelerate in the second movement (“The Ninth of January”) where the firing of the guards on the petitioning demonstrators is depicted in music of grinding ferocity, with screaming piccolos, timpani, brass, and five percussionists building the sonic assault to a terrifying climax.

The third movement (“Eternal Memory”) is another bleak Adagio where dirge-like music conveys a tragic expression. Yet there are also passages of touching humanity as in the violas’ elegiac song, set against cello and bass pizzicatos, which passes to the hopeful violins. The finale (“The Alarm”) unleashes an even more violent, mechanistic onslaught of brass, percussion and screeching winds. The raging cacophony is quelled by a forlorn English horn solo yet the brutal music returns against wild, unhinged woodwinds. The symphony closes on a metallic final chord, the chimes fading away to an ambivalent silence, which seems like the opposite of triumphant or victorious.

Thursday night’s performance unfolded in a single arc with the intensity never flagging for a single bar under Hrůša’s direction. This revelatory performance made a strong case for the Eleventh Symphony as one of Shostakovich’s finest works—not just a political potboiler but a deeper and more nuanced canvas, bolstering the view of several Shostakovich contemporaries that the Eleventh is as much about the enemy within in the 1950s as the enemy without a half-century earlier.

The CSO musicians excelled in playing of searing intensity, as a unit and with several individual standouts, including David Herbert in the crucial timpani part, percussionist Cynthia Yeh’s relentless snare drumming, and superb solos from guest principal trumpet Aaron Schuman, associate principal of the San Francisco Symphony. Scott Hostetler’s English horn solo began in loud and literal fashion but eventually conveyed something of Shostakovich’s besieged individual lost in a desolate landscape.

The all-Russian program led off with more populist fare with Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Simon Trpčeski as soloist

This week’s performances of Rachmaninoff’s Op. 1 effectively wrap the CSO’s extended observance of the 150th birthday anniversary of the composer (1873-1943), which has incorporated all his major symphonic works and concertos. (It’s too bad Rachmaninoff’s choral symphony The Bells—the composer’s favorite of his works—wasn’t slated but perhaps that will happen once a new choral director is in place.)

Written for the Moscow Conservatory as a student, the First Piano Concerto was the 18-year-old Rachmaninoff’s inaugural major work. While he performed the first movement with the conservatory orchestra at a school concert, it is unclear whether the work was ever played complete in its original form. The composer grew to hate the piece and substantially revised it in 1917, making the solo part more brilliant and removing much of the indebtedness to Grieg’s Piano Concerto, though some echoes of that influence remain. 

While the melodies aren’t quite as indelible as in his Second and Third Concertos to come nor the working out of his ideas as compelling, Rachmaninoff’s inimitable mix of keyboard fireworks and lilting lyricism are here, albeit in somewhat embryonic form.

Simon Trpčeski has recorded all of Rachmaninoff’s concertos as well as much of his solo keyboard output, and that experience was manifest in his no-holds-barred performance Thursday night. Launched with a punchy opening fanfare by Hrůša and the orchestra, Trpčeski leaped into the unbridled virtuosity of the opening movement, bringing the requisite power and panache as well as relaxing into the aching lyricism of the second theme.

The Macedonian pianist is a theatrical presence at the keyboard but he undoubtedly has the chops, tackling the fistfuls of notes with blazing speed and command, and putting across the youthful impetuosity of this score. Trpčeski artfully drew out the limpid theme of the Andante, and the final movement was as fast and exciting as one could wish, with Hrůša and the orchestra providing equally galvanic support. As well as matching his soloist’s fiery style, Hrůša illuminated details one rarely hears in this work, such as the bassoons’ singing line under the piano in the slow movement.

The vociferous ovations brought Trpčeski back out for a solo encore by his compatriot, Dimitrije Bužarovski (with Hrůša taking a seat at the back of the stage to hear it as well). “Ne si go prodavaj, Koljo” is an arrangement of a Macedonian folk song, beginning in a spare and introspective manner with a sudden jazzy breakout in the middle before returning to the subdued melancholy of the opening. The pianist played Bužarovski’s music with great nuance and sensitivity.