RSNO plays Shostakovich
Usher Hall, 6/6/2025
Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Daniel Müller-Schott (cello)
Thomas Søndergård (conductor)
Wow! Wow! And indeed – Wow!
I have perhaps not been too positive about the RSNO programming for 2025, and I was initially sceptical about the programme for tonight’s final concert of the season. Well, mea culpa etc, and I am bound to say that this was one of the finest concerts of the whole season, enjoyed by a very encouraging almost full house at the Usher Hall. A splendidly age divergent audience was enthralled by a concert of wildly different music by the same quirky Soviet composer, Dmitry Shostakovich.
An excellent and extremely amusing introductory chat about the composer and the music by the principal oboe player, Adrian Wilson, set the scene for an enthralling concert in which we could see and hear just how good the RSNO has become, under the continuing leadership of Thomas Søndergård, our Danish Maestro, and the leader, Maya Iwabuchi.
The orchestra opened with Shostakovich’s Festive Overture, written in the space of a few days in 1954 to celebrate the October Revolution in 1917. Commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, Shostakovich used the inspiration of the overture to Glinka’s famous opera of 1842, ‘Ruslan and Lyudmila,’ and some of the music from his own banned opera, ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’, to come up with a glittering and superbly thrilling overture.
The Festive Overture’s British debut was in our very own Usher Hall, in the presence of the composer, in 1962 at the Edinburgh International Festival, and I appeared in the first performance in the UK of ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’ as the Steward (clearly a very important role!), in a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in 1984, conducted by Howard Williams.
The second item on the programme was Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto, written for Mstislav Rostropovich, in 1966. I was lucky enough to see Rostropovich play the Bach Cello Suites in St Cuthbert’s Church in an Edinburgh Festival concert in the 1980s and sang under his baton in Snape Maltings in the same decade.
The Second Cello Concerto is less showy than the First (also written for Rostropovich), but nonetheless a magnificent work of musical invention. The soloist on Friday was the German cellist, Daniel Müller-Schott, who spent a whole year studying with Rostropovich, and who clearly has absorbed much from the masterly Russian. His tone from the start was rich and full, and his technique dazzling. Soloist and conductor obviously had a splendid rapport, and the concerto moved along seamlessly. I didn’t find myself gripped by the performance, but that was possibly to do with the composer and not the performers. Like Britten, almost his exact contemporary, Shostakovich’s style evolved during his career, and like Britten’s, I find his later music less appealing to my taste. Their later compositions seem to me to lack something of the red-hot intensity of their main work. Nonetheless, this was an excellent performance of an important concerto, warmly applauded by the audience. Mr Müller-Schott duly obliged us by playing a movement of one of J S Bach’s solo cello suites, a performance of rare skill and concentration.
After the interval, we were treated to a full-blooded rendition of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony, ostensibly a programmed symphonic homage to the Russians killed by Tsar Nicholas’s troops in the Bloody Sunday massacre in St Petersburg in 1905, a tragic precursor to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Discussions about the parallels with the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, and Shostakovich’s reaction to that event the year before the 11th Symphony was premiered in Moscow in 1957, have been ongoing ever since, but my reaction to the symphony was more visceral. I had never heard the 11th in a live performance before, and it blew my mind! Thomas Søndergård and the RSNO gave us a performance of truly epic status, and the reaction of the audience was immediate and overpowering.
From the opening of serene stillness, as dawn came up outside the Winter Palace in January 1905, through the terrible events of that day, when the Tsar’s troops opened fire on a peaceful crowd of demonstrators, through the 3rd movement’s memorial to their sacrifice, and ending in a gesture of defiance by the survivors and the unwavering message foretelling the big revolution, complete with church bells in the orchestra, Shostakovich created a magnificent work of genius, a work whose message is just as apposite today as it was nearly 70 years ago.
The playing was superb throughout, erasing memories of some rather sloppy ensemble a couple of weeks ago, and all sections of the orchestra were on fire. Great solos by Christopher Hart (trumpet) and Amy McKean (cor anglais) stood out, the percussion section was always on the move, and Paul Philbert (timpani) was immense. It was wonderful to hear the entire viola section given a very important melody on its own. Shostakovich tied the whole symphony together with a mixture of well-known revolutionary songs, all of which his original audience would have known intimately.
The 11th Symphony has a huge dynamic range, from ethereal strings playing pianissimo to some of the loudest orchestral playing I have ever heard. The fact that the RSNO was playing the same concert the next night in Glasgow is an indication of the stamina and dedication of the performers.
It was a brilliant end to a very good season, and we are already excited at the prospect of next season, beginning on October 3rd with Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony!
