Despotism and defiance powerfully manifest in NSO’s Russian program
Lisa Batiashvili performed Schnittke’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with Gianandrea Noseda and the National Symphony Orchestra Thursday night at the Kennedy Center. Photo: Scott Suchman
Gianandrea Noseda has been on a bit of a Russian kick with the National Symphony Orchestra this season. This week’s program combined two less-heard works, Alfred Schnittke’s Violin Concerto No. 1, with Lisa Batiashvili as soloist, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony. The evening in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall brimmed with caustic sarcasm and bombastic volume, sprinkled with some startling lyrical moments.
Batiashvili was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, and she has long been outspoken in her support of Ukraine against the Russian invasion. On this occasion, no words were required to draw attention to that cause: her gown in the colors of the Ukrainian flag said it all.
Last heard in the area as soloist with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra last year, Batiashvili played the unaccompanied solo opening to the first movement with quiet elegance. Noseda and the NSO took up this principal theme with a romantic touch, contrasted by a sly, sinuous sound in the quieter second theme. Beyond her limpid legato playing, heard in the climactic cadenza, Batiashvili’s incisive, fierce tone cut through the massed orchestral sound. (Batiashvili chose to omit the Presto second movement, an option the composer approved.)
The third movement began with a slowly oscillating motif in the violas, spinning a lush, mostly tonal fabric around Batiashvili’s sweet line. Hints of dissonance here and there kept the music from cloying, as the soloist floated her placid line above the orchestra. The violin section, led once again by concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef, returning from a brief leave of absence, took up the idea in a romantic swirl. Batiashvili held the final note, a fragile, ultra-high harmonic, for what seemed an eternity.
An earthy double-bass solo, framed by wisps of bassoon, opened the last movement. With an air of daring, Batiashvili lunged to push the tempo forward at her entrance, underscoring the score’s most prominent echoes of Shostakovich’s sardonic wit and Prokofiev’s hammered bass lines. In one of the fine cadenza-like pauses, the cello section insistently answered the soloist’s statements, leading to many biting double-stops in a brilliant conclusion.
With a late start of over ten minutes, Shostakovich’s sprawling Fourth Symphony pushed the evening long, even with insistently fast pacing from Noseda that kept the symphony’s timing to about an hour. (“It is a monstrosity,” Noseda put it, adding wryly “that I deeply love.”)
Denounced by Stalin’s government for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich was forced to withdraw the Fourth Symphony, which was not premiered until 1961, the same year as the Schnittke concerto. (The composer instead moved on to his Fifth Symphony, which Noseda and the NSO took on their European tour last year.)
As scholar Laurel Fay wrote, the Fourth “is in scope and scale, above all, where the shadow of Mahler looms largest” for Shostakovich. The augmented NSO filled every corner of the stage, with two harps, two tubas, two sets of timpani, and piles of everything else. Noseda reveled in the mass of sound the musicians could produce in the opening to the vast first movement, moving to a delicate secondary theme with glowing strings. Harps, piccolo, and flute added notes of tension, as did the celesta, while the woodwinds and strings took up manic episodes.
The second movement, a sort of Mahlerian triple-meter dance, featured a contrasting section with a languid violin solo, played by associate concertmaster Ying Fu. The curious conclusion of the movement, combining castanets, woodblock, and triangle, ticked away like a dying clock.
The Largo opening of the third movement had the feel of a funeral march, the tune introduced by bassoon perhaps recalling the “Bruder Martin” theme of Mahler’s First Symphony. The imperious brass section, vast in numbers, expanded this idea to cinematic proportions, with the four trumpets consistently blistering in volume all evening long.
Shostakovich’s booming use of C major chords in the brass seemed poised to move the Allegro conclusion of the third movement toward a heroic apotheosis. The broad trombone solos, played with comic verve by Craig Mulcahy, set a different tone. A throbbing pedal note in the double-basses marked off the symphony’s dark ending, with rumbles of bass drum, muted trumpet calls, and the anxious tolling of the celesta, as the music faded slowly to silence.
Noseda’s skillful interpretation of this difficult work managed to wrangle all of the details into place—not just the vast dynamic contrasts of ear-splitting loudness and fragile softness—but did so with a convincing through-line that made sense as a grand arc.
The program will be repeated 11:30 a.m. Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday. kennedy-center.org
