Music: Hit for Shostakovich

The stooped man in the crumpled grey suit stood on the stage of London’s Royal Festival Hall, bowing gently and solemnly to the welling applause. Twice he withdrew, and twice he returned, walking with awkward, nervous steps. If Dmitry Shostakovich was surprised by the ovation, so was his audience by what it had heard: the Shostakovich Concerto for Cello, being given its London premiere, was one of the most immediate concert hits in years.

Exuberant & Witty. Performed by Russia’s eminent cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, and the visiting Leningrad Symphony Orchestra, the 28-minute concerto emerged as a work of compelling rhythms, long, curving lyric lines, exuberantly witty folklike figurations. Although its technical demands were tremendous (“If Shostakovich had written two more bars for the cadenza,” said Rostropovich, “I could not have played them”), the acrobatics were not merely contrived, as has been true of so much of Shostakovich’s recent work, notably his vapid, bombastic Eleventh Symphony. The concerto, wrote the Sunday Times, presented “a real conflict and a final solution.”

Shostakovich’s popular triumph was matched by that of Cellist Rostropovich, whose virtuosity and richly burnished tone invoked comparisons with Casals. As for the 106-member Leningrad orchestra, it was the hit of London, which has no first-rate symphony of its own. The oldest orchestra in Russia, it is also Russia’s best. Under Conductor Eugene Mravinsky, 57, the orchestra plays a generous number of modern works by composers like Hindemith, Stravinsky, Britten, Copland. In London it played mostly Russian works—although it learned Benjamin Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra in two rehearsals, as the inevitable Soviet good-will gesture.

Brisk & Martial. The Leningrad’s greatest strength is its string section, which plays with a precision and dynamic range beyond the ability of most Western orchestras. The brasses are bright—almost too much so. Reported Critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor: “They are encouraged to play like cavalry on the line.” But the Leningrad’s most distinctive feature is the way in which it separates the various sections of the orchestra: instead of aiming for a thickly blended sound. Conductor Mravinsky emphasizes differences in coloration. The tempos, even in romantic composers, are brisk, martial—and not to every taste. Said Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, after hearing the Leningrad play Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony: “I never want to hear the Fifth played again by anyone else.” But the London Observer’s critic, after hearing Tchaikovsky’s melancholy Sixth (the “Pathétique”) given a robust, uplifting performance, demurred: “I cannot bring myself to believe that this symphony ends with a stiff upper lip.”