Who never wrote a bad note? If Mozart springs to mind, you’re in good company. Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelsons would agree with you. But next to Wolfgang Amadeus, Nelsons would also offer up a more controversial choice: Dmitri Shostakovich.
For a decade, Nelsons has been exploring Shostakovich with the BSO. The project has won the maestro and symphony an armful of Grammys and may earn them a few more when the final installment of the recordings of the composer’s symphonies, featuring nos. 2, 3, 12, and 13, is released on Oct. 20. And that exploration continues this week, through Oct. 15, with Nelsons conducting Yo-Yo Ma through both of Shostakovich’s cello concertos at Symphony Hall.
Nelsons, who grew up in Latvia during Soviet rule, learned about Shostakovich as a boy in music school.
“I remember reading Russian books that said, ‘Fifth symphony of Shostakovich is a milestone, a wonderful work where the confused artist has lost his orientation and then he finds through the suffering and darkness the light of communistic ideas,” Nelsons told the Herald.
Only that’s not what Shostakovich was writing about. Later Nelsons came to understand that this titan of Soviet art did his best to undermine the glory of the regime in his symphonies.
“Thanks to the genius of Shostakovich, he managed to fool the authorities,” Nelsons said. “From the fourth symphony on, there are these qualities, the grotesque, sarcasm, irony, black humor… He understood that there was only one way, he had to keep writing and fool them.”
Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” thrilled Moscow in the mid-1930 until Stalin saw it. The day after the dictator saw the opera, the state newspaper ripped apart “Lady Macbeth.” Worried about being sent to the gulag, Shostakovich wrote “a Soviet artist’s response to just criticism.” The state approved the symphony, but many heard undertones of protest music.
These notes of protest continued even after the death of Stalin. In the end, living under one party rule seems to crush the composer. The sad and wonderful thing about the BSO recording Shostakovich’s complete symphonic cycle is you can hear that play out over a collection of CDs. But if you’re not ready to commit to all 15 symphonies, you can also hear that in one night with the cello concertos.
“The first concerto was written in this period where he was stronger, ready to, through music, fight against this idealism of nonsense,” Nelsons said. “When we look to the other concerto, Stalin is dead already, so you could think, ‘Good, Shostakovich has won.’ But what we hear in the 11th symphony, in the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th and the second cello concerto is that he is getting more dark and more depressed.”
But concerto to symphony, light to dark, resistance to resignation, one thing remains true — and you can hear it in Nelsons’ work with the BSO — the composer never wrote a bad note.
For tickets and details, visit bso.org
