Beethoven 5 and Shostakovich 10

Usher Hall, 12/8/2025

Beethoven 5 and Shostakovich 10

London Symphony Orchestra, Conductor Sir Antonio Pappano, Presenter Nicola Benedetti

Last night’s opening concert of the LSO Residency gave us a double bill of two monumental symphonies. Both well-known and well-loved, representing contrasting composers working in radically different contexts, both notoriously difficult to play, placing huge demands on this wonderful orchestra. In a short pre-concert interview with Nicola Benedetti, Pappano quotes Beethoven’s description of his famous opening motif, as ‘Fate knocking at the door’ and we hear this motif repeated in numerous variations throughout the symphony, often ominous and threatening and often allied with more melodious themes as it is early in the first movement. Pappano speaks of the symphony being ‘streamlined with not one ounce of fat on it’, and indeed it would repay (and has many times received) a detailed study of the interweaving of these variations. Throughout as Pappano says we cannot overlook the humanity of Beethoven, the determination to fight and overcome the obstacles put in his way or die fighting them. Beethoven was a contemporary of Hegel, and though he left Germany as a young man and lived his adult life in Vienna, they shared a cultural climate. And Vienna did indeed present obstacles to Beethoven, dominated as it was by Church and imperial court, by a restrictive social structure, with huge inequalities of wealth and power, and dependence on patronage, not to speak of the physical obstacle of his own deepening deafness. At the same time it was a society that revered cultural achievement and gave access to beauty in many forms, cultural, architectural, geographical, and in some respects in the hard everyday life of citizens.

One is tempted (probably unwisely!) to ask what a Hegelian would say to Shostakovich’s situation? Did Shostakovich, working on his 10th symphony between 1947 and 1953, and maybe earlier, have the same potential for struggle and hope? Shostakovich worked within a totalitarian state which ostensibly claimed to right the wrongs of the past, but only on the terms and with the approval of the state and the dictator, with savage punishments regularly inflicted on its opponents. Denounced by Stalin in 1934, Shostakovich survived by stealth, by self-denial and by compromise. To my mind this symphony performed for the first time soon after Stalin’s death, was not the work of a rebel, but of someone who hated and despised the system he was obliged to work within. We have 45 minutes of pain – anguished angry pain, heavy threatening pain, bleak hopeless pain, all brilliantly executed by the orchestra – followed by a few minutes of angry excitement and another few of peace and hope.

It was a hard listen, and for those who like me were overwhelmed by history, we were rewarded with the consolation of the LSO’s encore, a beautiful rendering of Sibelius’ ‘Valse Triste’.

An uncompromising programme, delivered with honesty, skill and compassion.

Photo credit: Andrew Perry