Royal Albert Hall has a seating capacity of almost six thousand arranged in a circle of serried ranks and levels.
Tamara and I sat in the Upper Tier to watch a performance, the second time we had been to the Albert Hall within a week. The first time was to watch a Spanish-inspired evening that included Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez and Ravel’s Bolero. Well, Ravel was not exactly Spanish. He was French, but he had Swiss and Basque heritage.
Truth is, I wasn’t that taken with that first evening. It was good, but just a bit too languid, which I put down to the conductor lacking bite. I guessed as much before the start, because he didn’t have the hair for a conductor. Take my word for it, conductors generally have plenty of good hair, which they need to control an orchestra.
Not so with this second visit. If you think the Scots are staid, watch the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, with Thomas Søndergård conductor. He was excellent. They were excellent. At some points watching him with his whole body moving and seeing the violin section moving together, it was like the sea.
After the interval, the music was given over to just one piece – Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 in G minor ‘The Year 1905’.
It is long and it starts out very quietly and continues quietly for a long time until it builds into something louder and stronger and stronger. And then, boy, does it hammer out music that is unrelenting and unforgiving. And all this without a particularly strong or memorable melody.
As the programme has it “the work’s four movements pay vivid homage to the First Russian
Revolution, plunging listeners into the violence of its Bloody Sunday massacre and the grief and anger that followed.”
Shostakovich composed it in 1957, after the death of Stalin in 1953. And as I was listening, I was thinking of the composer’s life hanging by a thread during Stalin’s life.
In 1936 Stalin walked out of Shostakovich’s opera, and two days later an unsigned article appeared in the State newspaper, Pravda, condemning the music. A year later Shostakovich composed a piece that restored his reputation. Throughout the war and through the long siege of Leningrad, his Symphony No. 7 was effectively the country’s anthem.
It didn’t last long, and in 1948 his music was decreed to be anti-people and he was forced to apologise and keep a low profile. Then,, another change, and after Stalin’s death, he composed Symphony No, 10, as his payback in music describing the brutality of Stalin’s Russia.
So then at the Albert hall, as we were listening to Symphony No. 11 in G minor ‘The Year 1905’, which I had never heard before, I was thinking about the terror he endured for years and years, about how he managed not just to stay alive, but to thrive.
The symphony lasts about an hour, and there are points in the music when it sounds like a warning, the kind that makes you stop and prick up your ears and be on the alert and ready.
It reminded me of the theme music by James Horner for the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates. A quick search, and yes, Horner drew on Shostakovich’s music for the score. Unbelievable that it was 2001. How time flies.