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PITTSBURGH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
RUSSIAN DRESSING


Led by Mariss Jansons, its music director since 1997, the Pittsburgh Symphony had a lot going for it in its FleetBoston Celebrity Series appearance at Symphony Hall last Sunday: two Boston premieres, the first Boston appearance of a superb young British mezzo-soprano, the orchestra itself in top form, and a program few conductors alive are better equipped to perform.

Under former director André Previn, Pittsburgh was one of the cities in on the ground floor of the composer-in-residence program (Boston’s John Harbison was its first). Last year, the orchestra inaugurated a new version of that idea, "Composer of the Year," and the first was Rodion Shchedrin, known to Bostonians primarily through his opera Dead Souls, which Sarah Caldwell produced as a centerpiece in her memorable 1988 Russian-American music festival "Making Music Together." Other music I’ve heard by Shchedrin has been less effective — skillful hackwork, Russian dressing. And his Dialogues with Shostakovich falls into the latter category. This 15-minute piece, in which Shchedrin pays homage to his master, seems hardly more than a series of derivative gestures, most of them from Shostakovich (rattling military snare drums, ominous tapping, violent folk dance, brassy carillon), some from Bruckner (a galloping Scherzo) and Mahler (sleigh bells), where Shostakovich got some his own ideas. Maybe it should have been even more derivative.

Mahler returned in the next piece, but it was Alma, not Gustav — seven of the composer’s wife’s 16 songs (all written before their marriage) orchestrated by composer brothers Colin and David Matthews and creamily, expressively, yet simply sung by Jane Irwin, who gave the North American premiere in Pittsburgh on November 1. These are less undiscovered masterpieces of the German lieder repertoire than imitations of traditional lieder themes (love, the spirit of Nature, harvest, dreams and dreaminess) by a sophisticated novice with questionable taste in poetry (the best poems are by Rilke and Dehmel). When they became engaged, Mahler forbade Alma to compose any more, though he changed his mind in 1910, after the crisis in their marriage. The Matthews brothers say their orchestration is more in the fin de siècle style of Zemlinsky and Schoenberg than Mahler, but there are plenty of Mahlerian touches, especially the evocative wind writing, which at Symphony Hall was ravishingly played. Some of the string accompaniments are excessive, almost Hollywood. A couple of the original piano versions seem better for their lack of affect.

The major piece was Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, from 1953 — composed shortly after the death of Stalin, it may be a surreptitious and satirical savaging of the late dictator who virtually drove the composer out of the concert halls and the opera house. Jansons was born in Latvia; his father, Arvid, was deputy conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic under the great Yevgeny Mravinsky, who premiered six of Shostakovich’s symphonies, including the 10th. Many people consider it Shostakovich’s best, but I find is too unrelenting to be one of my favorites.

Jansons conducted it with slashing ferocity and a sense of spaciousness. The opening Moderato movement was certainly in no hurry; the closing Allegro felt like a joyless whirlwind. It was a brilliant and impressive performance. But when I got home and listened to Mravinsky’s 1976 live recording, I heard a riskier, more mercurial intensity that, though it didn’t make me love the symphony, held me in its grip at every moment.

BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Issue Date: November 21 - 28, 2002
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