Over it, individual instruments, then groups, play what sounds like a jaunty march tune - over and over. Instead, a snare drum plays an obsessive march rhythm. The most curious section of the nearly half-hour first movement comes when you expect a development section to begin. The transition from there into a quizzically lyrical passage was deftly handled. van Zweden drew a dark, deep tone in the opening theme: a stern yet elusive melodic line, played in unison, that is soon goaded by bursts of drums and trumpets. Thomson is not NECESSARILY wrong, but I know the seventh well and find much to admire in it.įrom the Philharmonic strings, Mr. (Critics who question the symphony’s merits, including Virgil Thomson, have found it obvious and steeped in banality.)
He pushed the orchestra to blaring extremes at times, but the excessiveness of the music may call for that. He laid out this shifting score clearly, letting it speak for itself. van Zweden seemed to take the piece at face value - in the best sense. I am aware of divergence of critics on these points. Are there coded, anti-Stalinist messages in the piece? And are those long stretches of militaristic-sounding marches bitterly ironic? Debates continue over whether he intended it as a grim portrait of a historic city under siege, or as a more general cry against tyranny. Shostakovich began composing this symphony, his seventh, before the German invasion. Written in 1941, while Hitler’s forces were devastating Leningrad in a siege that would last 900 days and take at least a million lives, the work practically screams, “This is a big statement!”Īnd scream it did on Thursday at Geffen Hall, where Jaap van Zweden led the New York Philharmonic in a performance of the “Leningrad” that was intense and powerful - sometimes overly so. Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony is a sprawling score that heaves, blasts, marches and meanders for nearly 80 minutes.
“At the Philharmonic, a Screaming Reflection on War”Įxcerpts from the Tommasini review follow, along with comments of my own that I made in a letter to a friend. The following comments of mine were prompted by a recent, rather wishy washy review by New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini of Dmitri Shostakovich’s seventh symphony:
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