While US-precipitated havoc continues to reign in Iraq, the Pittsburgh Symphony and its music director Mariss Jansons are partway through a European tour with a programme that peers back beyond the present crisis to the effects of the convulsions at the heart of the 20th century.
Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta was written in 1936. More than any other work of its time, the piece captures the unease of Europe as it confronted the emergence of nazism. Shostakovich, meanwhile, composed his 10th Symphony in the wake of Stalin's death in 1953, and its relief at the end of a dictatorship is balanced by a warning that violence casts a shadow that lasts longer than any regime change.
At the Barbican, both works were performed with an almost shocking intensity - the product of Jansons's dramatic control and athletic energy, and the Pittsburgh Symphony's mix of American bravura with European warmth, a quality that makes them the finest orchestra in the US. Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta heaved with menace from the start as the harmonies of its opening fugue began to churn and clot. The implosions into savagery were negotiated with a rhythmic precision that was second to none, while the clicking xylophone and slithering strings of the great central nocturne were the stuff of nightmare.
The focal point of Jansons's interpretation of Shostakovich's 10th was the Scherzo. "A musical portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking," is how the composer reportedly described it, and Jansons unleashed an alarming barrage of sound - at once ferocious, crushing and banal - that coloured all that went before and followed. In the opening movement, there were painful reminders of music deemed questionable under Stalin: the meandering bassoon that seems to have strayed from The Rite of Spring, the wobbly clarinet waltz that echoes Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. The emotional tensions of the slow movement, with its romantic horn calls and jarring piccolo flourishes, brought no relief, while the finale's riotous triumphalism threatened to mutate into the Scherzo's violence at every turn.
Jansons mercifully allowed us to unwind with his encores: an achingly slow version of Sibelius's Valse Triste, and the Navarraise from Massenet's Le Cid, done with incredible flamboyance. The audience was on its feet when it was over. Few standing ovations have ever been so richly deserved.
