"What hope have we of another life when it is stifled by the banner we live under?" This question lies at the heart of Shostakovich's Suite on Verses of Michelangelo. One of his last completed scores, it ranks among his most penetrating analyses of the relationship between the individual and the state.
Both the suite and its subject loomed over the second weekend of Manchester's centenary retrospective. On Friday, Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic placed the suite alongside the Fifth Symphony, written in reaction to charges of formalism, and notoriously dubbed "A Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism". The following evening, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and the Hallé gave us the Eleventh, a musical narrative of the abortive 1905 revolution, often castigated for its over-reliance on the tenets of socialist realism. Though radically different, each performance focused on Shostakovich's need to find a voice by anchoring himself in an aesthetic tradition beyond the immediate political context.
Noseda presented the Fifth as a quest for a return to the values of absolute music. There was no obvious politicking, none of the usual attempts to examine disparities between overt expression and covert dissidence. Instead, we were given breathtaking insights into the work's structure and sonorities in a performance at once superbly shaped and intensely reflective.
Skrowaczewski's Eleventh, in contrast, was gloriously rabble-rousing, though the emphasis also fell on specifically Russian elements of musical tradition. The clanging bells and huge chorales carried echoes of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, with its vision of the cyclic patterns of revolution and autocracy that haunt Russian history.
Skrowaczewski's choice of companion piece was Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, a noble, elegiac account, in which some exceptional playing at the close made up for a lack of driven ferocity at the start. Noseda's conducting of the Suite on Verses of Michelangelo, meanwhile, was a model of subtle clarity. The work has been better sung, though: baritone Ildar Abdrazakov revealed a richly sensual tone, but made far too little of that all-important text.
