≈ 2 hours · With intermission
Repertoire
Night, herself
Piano Concerto No. 3
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47
I. Moderato
II. Allegretto
III. Largo
IV. Allegro non troppo
By the early 1930s, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) was one of the Soviet Union’s leading composers, renowned in his home country and abroad. In 1934, his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District premiered in Leningrad to huge acclaim. Two years later, despite having already received 180 performances, the work was denounced in the newspaper Pravda as “muddle instead of music,” after Joseph Stalin and his officials attended a new Bolshoy production on January 26, 1936. Practically overnight, Shostakovich became an artistic pariah; on February 6, another public blow was dealt when his ballet The Limpid Stream was condemned in the paper as a “balletic falsity.” From these unsigned articles, the message of Stalin’s government became crystal clear: mend your artistic ways or face the consequences. Shockwaves rippled across the Soviet cultural establishment—one of their leading lights was under threat of being extinguished and soon many others would be targets. As Stalin’s Great Purge began, those found not falling into line risked arrest, time at a brutal labour camp, or execution.
Having endured the Pravda denunciations, Shostakovich now had to figure out a way to survive artistically. At this critical juncture, he might have created a work that either set a text or followed a programmatic description that, in explicitly extolling the party line, might placate Stalin and his officials. Instead, he sought to rehabilitate his reputation with a symphony. This was a gamble, to be sure. Shostakovich had been working on his Fourth Symphony when the denunciations happened, and even after his humiliation, he planned to have it premiered in December 1936. During rehearsals, the piece was withdrawn at the last minute (it was not premiered until 1961). He pressed on, composing his fifth symphony between April and June of 1937 (during the height of the Great Purge); the first performance, by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, took place on November 21 that year.
Public reaction to the premiere was extraordinary—there was open weeping during the slow movement and at the end, a standing ovation that lasted over half an hour. The responses of critics were also generally very positive. Very quickly soon after, the work was absorbed into the Soviet canon of performance repertoire and Shostakovich’s stature was gradually restored. It also became a hit internationally. Today, it remains the most popular and most frequently performed of Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies.
Composed under unprecedented conditions of political surveillance and interference, the Fifth Symphony was a significant turning point for Shostakovich creatively. According to musicologist David Fanning, the composer “needed a formula for balancing his artistic conscience with requirements handed down from above, which could be as unpredictable as they were imperative.” The abstract form of the symphony was the way forward, for within it, Shostakovich could, Fanning further notes, “continue to moderate his style in the direction of ‘acceptable’ lyrical and heroic intonations while at the same time devising an interplay of contextual and intertextual meanings which could modify or even contradict the surface impression.” As the first development of this concept, the Fifth was a very successful one, not least also because of those who, as Shostakovich specialist Pauline Fairclough has observed, “knew how to frame and interpret [the Fifth] in such a way that its acclaim could be justified in ideological terms” to the Soviet authorities. In the months following the premiere, through the spin of journalism, the symphony came to take on the subtitle (not Shostakovich’s, to be clear) of “A Soviet Artist’s Creative Response to Just Criticism.”
For his Fifth, Shostakovich employed a tried-and-true model, established by Beethoven in his own Fifth Symphony over a century earlier and used by many composers thereafter: that of the symphony conveying a psychological journey from struggle to triumph. Speaking to a Literaturnaya gazeta correspondent for an article published January 12, 1938, he had claimed that he wished “to show in the [fifth] symphony how through a series of tragic conflicts and through great internal struggles, ‘optimism as a worldview’ could triumph.” Certainly, he was aware of the universal appeal of the concept. Only in the notes of the score did he hint at what this meant to him personally: the fourth movement includes musical quotations from his 1936 setting of Pushkin’s poem “Rebirth”, the text of which describes the survival of true art in the face of an “artist-barbarian” who “blackens the painting of a genius.”
Within this arc, the music of the Fifth traverses a vast emotional terrain conveyed through the composer’s inventive mastery of orchestration technique and symphonic process. The influence of Gustav Mahler is evident (Shostakovich had been studying his symphonies at the time of the Fifth’s composition), albeit with a Shostakovichian twist. You’ll hear it throughout in the evocation of bleak, desolate landscapes, sinister marches and ironic Ländlers, massive climactic build-ups that are brutally thwarted, and moments of fragility—tender, hopeful, consoling. From the tragic grandeur of its first movement, through the darkly humorous second, the anguished heart of the third, to its blazing finale, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is an intensely cathartic musical experience.
Yet, you’d be right in detecting more than a hint of ambivalence in the “triumphant” coda of the finale (observant critics at the premiere also perceived this). After all, it’s hardly the expression of unbridled joy: Following a massive slow down and a wrenching shift to D major, it proceeds at an obstinately steady pace. Over sustained brass fanfares and booming strokes of timpani, strings and woodwinds relentlessly intone the same pitches at fortississimo (extremely loudly) for well over a minute until just before the final chord. Over the years, subjected to competing interpretations (both in words and in performance), the “meaning” of this ending has proved particularly slippery and controversial. Some have doubted the sincerity of the triumph, but this, too, is overly reductionist. Moreover, as Fairclough has thoroughly investigated, it wouldn’t have made sense for Soviet audiences to react so openly and strongly to the symphony and for the Leningrad and Moscow Philharmonics to perform it as frequently as they did (at least 21 times between them alone from 1937 to 1941), risking their lives to champion a work by a composer whose reputation was on shaky ground, if it was felt the triumph was simply forced or false. Perhaps, then, the remarkable power of the ending of Shostakovich’s Fifth is in its multivalency—that it speaks to our capacity to feel conflicting emotions, and enables us to embrace them, individually and collectively, within the complexities of our own experiences.
Program notes by Hannah Chan-Hartley, PhD
Artists
Dutch conductor Otto Tausk is the Music Director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and Artistic Advisor of the VSO School of Music, now in his fourth season. He is also Chief Conductor of Phion Orkest van Gelderland & Overijssel, and until spring 2018, was Music Director of the Opera Theatre and Tonhalle Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen. He appears as a guest with such orchestras as Concertgebouworkest, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Lahti Symphony Orchestra, Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, Philharmonie Südwestfalen, Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Mariinsky Orchestra, the orchestras of Perth, Tasmania, Auckland, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and BBC National Orchestra of Wales, with whom he made his BBC Proms debut in August 2018. He is a hugely respected musical personality in his native Holland, working with all its major orchestras and composers.
Recently, in Vancouver Tausk led an innovative reimagined season in response to the COVID-19 crisis, showcasing the orchestra with a curated series of digital performances. In the 2021/22 season, he continues guesting relationships with orchestras such as Norwegian Radio Orchestra and Orchestre National de Belgique. 2021/22 also marks the beginning of a multi-season project combining the symphonies of Schumann with a new commissioned work. With Phion Orkest van Gelderland & Overijssel, programming highlights include performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6. In the opera pit, this season he conducts the world premiere of Michel van der Aa’s new opera ‘Upload’, with appearances worldwide at the Dutch National Opera, Oper Köln, Bregenzer Festspiele and Park Avenue Armory in New York. In St. Gallen, Tausk conducted the world premiere of ‘Annas Maske’, by Swiss composer David Philip Hefti, the Swiss premiere of George Benjamin’s ‘Written on Skin’, Korngold’s ‘Die Tote Stadt’ and other titles including ‘Don Giovanni’, ‘Die Entführung aus dem Serail’, ‘Eugene Onegin’, ‘West Side Story’, ‘Lohengrin’ and ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’.
Tausk has recorded with the Concertgebouworkest (Luc Brewaeys, and an animated version of Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’), Tonhalle Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen (Korngold and Diepenbrock), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Mendelssohn) and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra (Gavin Bryars) amongst others. For the cpo label in 2011 Hans Pfitzner’s enchanting Orchesterlieder garnered international praise, not least the Classica France’s ‘Choc du mois’. His Prokofiev disc with Rosanne Philippens also received BBC Music Magazine Concerto Disc of the Month (2018).
Born in Utrecht, Otto Tausk initially studied violin and then conducting with Jonas Aleksa. Between 2004 and 2006, Tausk was assistant conductor to Valery Gergiev with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, a period of study that had a profound impact on him. In 2011 Tausk was presented with the ‘De Olifant’ prize by the City of Haarlem. He received this prestigious award for his contribution to the Arts in the Netherlands, in particular his extensive work with Holland Symfonia serving as Music Director 2007 to 2012. In reflecting on their work together in The Netherlands, Valery Gergiev paid particular tribute to Tausk on this occasion.
Proclaimed “a phenomenon” by the Los Angeles Times and “one of the best pianists of his generation” by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stewart Goodyear is an accomplished concert pianist, improviser, and composer. He has performed with, and has been commissioned by, many of the major orchestras and chamber music organizations around the world.
Last year, Orchid Classics released Goodyear’s recording of his suite for piano and orchestra, Callaloo, and his piano sonata. His recent commissions include a piano quintet for the Penderecki String Quartet, and a piano work for the Honens Piano Competition.
Stewart Goodyear’s discography includes the complete sonatas and piano concertos of Beethoven, as well as concertos by Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Rachmaninoff; an album of Ravel piano works; and an album entitled For Glenn Gould, which combines repertoire from Gould’s U.S. and Montreal debuts. Goodyear’s recording of his own transcription of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker (complete ballet), was chosen by The New York Times as one of the best classical music recordings of 2015. His discography is released on the Marquis Classics, Orchid Classics, Bright Shiny Things, Steinway and Sons, and Naxos labels.
Last summer included performances with the Chineke! Orchestra at Southbank Centre (U.K.) and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, the Grant Park Music Festival, and the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York. He also performed with Chineke! at the NAC in March 2023. Highlights of the 2023–2024 season are his recital debut at Wigmore Hall, his debut with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, his return with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and his Carnegie Hall debut with Toronto’s Royal Conservatory Orchestra under Peter Oundjian.
Founded in 1919, the GRAMMY and JUNO–award winning Vancouver Symphony Orchestra presents passionate, high-quality performances of classical, popular, and culturally diverse music, creating meaningful engagement with audiences of all ages and backgrounds. On tour the VSO has performed in the United States, China, Korea, and across Canada.
Led by Music Director Otto Tausk since 2018, the VSO performs more than 150 concerts each year, throughout Vancouver and the province of British Columbia, reaching over 270,000 people annually, and is one of the few orchestras in the world to have its own music school.
Recent guest artists include Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Joe Hisaishi, Daniil Trifonov, Dawn Upshaw, James Ehnes, Adrianne Pieczonka, Gidon Kremer, Renée Fleming, Yefim Bronfman, Bernadette Peters, Tan Dun, and more.
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Official Car of the NAC Orchestra
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International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees