Valery Gergiev's latest instalment of his complete Shostakovich symphony cycle seemed to present two contrasting sides of the composer: the youthful high spirits of the First Symphony, finished when he was 19, and the morbid intensity of the 14th, composed near the end of his life and setting 11 poems about death for two singers and chamber orchestra. In his electrifying performances with the London Symphony Orchestra, Gergiev revealed connections between these pieces, throwing new light on the young Shostakovich and the composer of the late 1960s.
The First might just be the most prodigiously ambitious work by a teenage composer in the history of music. Gergiev and the LSO made the piece sound at once like a deconstruction of symphonic form and an attempt at a new kind of musical coherence. The first movement was a cartoon-like cavalcade of fragments, a hurtling chase in search of a proper theme, which was teasingly revealed in blasts of brass writing. The second movement was even more extreme: after another brazen brass tune, the piano thumped out a handful of chords before a throwaway ending for strings. But these Tom-and-Jerry capers were followed by more intense music in the third and fourth movements, especially Moray Welsh's melancholy cello solo, an oasis of calm in the middle of the frenetic finale.
At the dead centre of the 14th Symphony, Welsh had another long solo, accompanying soprano Olga Sergeeva's searing performance of the fourth song in the symphony, Apollinaire's meditation on a suicide's grave. With the LSO pared down to a handful of strings and percussion, the effect was more intimate and powerful than the First Symphony. It was as if the musical gestures of Shostakovich's youth - the marching rhythms, the fleeting, obsessive melodies - were distilled and intensified. Sergey Alexashkin's bass was ensnared by the empty rattling of the strings in the seventh number, depicting a prisoner in his cell. But it was Sergeeva's performance of the penultimate song, Rilke's ode to a dead poet, that summed up Gergiev's vertiginous performance, lurching from deathly stasis to fragile hope.
