Lebrecht Weekly | Shostakovich’s 15th Symphony

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Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his last symphony with left hand alone. A heart attack in 1966, followed by several falls and fractures, left him heavily disabled. His solution was to train one hand to do the work of two and economising on physical effort. This may explain the expanses of blank staves in some pages of his fifteenth symphony, as if he lacked strength to fill in instrumental detail.

Maxim Shostakovich, who conducted the 1972 premiere, called the work his father’s ‘birth-to-death autobiography’. That, too, is only a partial view. The symphony opens with a holiday funfair and a blast of Rossini’s William Tell. Shostakovich is blowing a rude noise at his situation, perhaps at life itself. A quarter-hour Adagio brings no consolation. A third movement, just four minutes of it, only exacerbates the discomfort before a finale made up of alternating Adagios and Allegrettos steers us to some kind of acceptance of the sporadic games that fate plays with our existence.

The fifteenth is an enigma that few conductors crack. The only recording that has convinced me until now was led by Kurt Sanderling, a close associate of Shostakovich who knew his inner language and caustic wit. Sanderling never, to my knowledge, offered a literal clue to the work.

The present recording is conducted by Bernard Haitink, who delayed engaging with Shostakovich until late in life and performed it here with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2015. Ignoring the obvious difficulties in the score, Haitink lets the music unfold, page by page, as a big unanswered question. This is an act of storytelling in which the deliberate lack of resolution at the symphony’s end appears to be the only possible conclusion. Shostakovich is saying: we’ll never know the meaning of life, just get on with it. The humility in that recognition is aesthetically and spiritually reassuring. In a week that brought news of the death of Sofia Gubaidulina, a composer who shared Shostakovich’s Soviet suffering, this penetrating performance makes some sense of our mortal fragility.