Concert conducted by Tugan Sokhiev at the Philharmonie de Paris
With the Paris Opera Orchestra

Marked by the seal of disaster - the disaster of a people wounded by a bloody dictatorship - Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4 reflects a conflict opposing creative freedom and censorship, inner world and the dictates of power, standing or fading away.

In 1935, following the extraordinary success of his first Symphony (1925) and his second opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1930-1932), Shostakovich could still count on the approval of his country's authorities while enjoying world fame. Yet, the year 1936 marked a dramatic turning point in his life. On January 26, Stalin and Zhdanov attended his opera. Two days later, an anonymous article released in the Pravda and entitled ‘Muddle Instead of Music’, condemned the “petty-bourgeois formalism” of the composer and “his shrilling, wriggling, neurasthenic music”, ending with a hardly hidden threat: “It plays with hermeticism, but that game could end very badly”.

Shostakovich decided to cancel the premiere of his Symphony No. 4, even though rehearsals had begun in the autumn of 1936. A few reasons were given to explain this retreat: the composer was not fully satisfied with his work, the conductor and the musicians were not able to render such complex music… Most likely, political pressures, from Leningrad Philharmonic Director Isai Renzin among others, made Shostakovich realise that going through with this project was putting his life at risk.

The Symphony No. 4 was not created until 30 December 1961, at the Moscow Conservatory with Kirill Kondrashin, after the ascension of Khrushchev to power and the beginning of his De-Stalinization policy. Since the manuscript for the work had been lost during World War II, the score was recreated for the occasion thanks to various orchestral parts and a two-piano version published confidentially in 1946.

Following this late premiere, American critics described the work as a “gargantuan symphony”, in reference to its gigantic proportions. This monumental work, which lasts for over an hour and requires an impressive orchestra of 128 musicians, consists of three movements instead of the usual four. If Shostakovich declared, in 1935, that this symphony is the “credo” of his creative work, it may be because the composer sought to embrace, in the manner of Mahler, a form of wholeness.

Author: Pietro Milli