Shostakovich and Evgeny Mravinsky, who conducted the premiere of Shostakovich Five – Leningrad, November 21,1937 – and recorded it a few months later, March 27, 1938
Saturday, August 16, 2025
Royal Albert Hall, London
1) A musical and dramatic exploration of Shostakovich’s Symphony No.5
2) Symphony No.5 in D-minor (performed from memory)
Max Revell actor/dancer
Aurora Orchestra
Polly Frame actor
Craig Stein actor
Sarah Twomey actor
Jane Mitchell Co-Director and scriptwriter
James Bonas Co-Director
Scott Graham for Frantic Assembly Co-director
Sean Hollands for Frantic Assembly Associate to Scott Graham
Zakk Hein video design
David Bishop lighting design
Nicholas Collon
“Explore a symphony from the inside out. Nicholas Collon and the Aurora Orchestra reflect this year’s Shostakovich anniversary with a Prom that takes the audience under the hood of a 20th-century masterpiece and into the mind of the man who made it. Actors join the Aurora’s players to bring to life a symphony born in the shadow of Stalin’s regime – music on the edge of life and death by a composer treading a dangerous line between political obedience and artistic defiance.”
The production, fifty minutes or so, offering background to the search for “the perfect Soviet Symphony” was quite well-done, Nicholas Collon as Stalin, Max Revell as Shostakovich, others unnamed (now added) as Stalin’s apparatchiks, weighing up the musical ideas as to what represents the ideal ingredients of the desired opus. Most aspects were already familiar, although the concision of the story would probably have suited someone new to the work and curious about it and its gestation, as well as the atmospheres of the time, not least the dreaded knock on the door at the dead of night. Well-received at its Leningrad premiere, “a Soviet artist’s response to just criticism”, Shostakovich made amends to Stalin (if the Symphony was taken at face-value) who had loathed the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, no doubt finding it cacophonous and decadent, denouncing it in a newspaper article. And Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony had been withdrawn due to anticipating a similar response from the dictator. That work waited twenty-five years to be aired in public.
During the ‘play’ Aurora Orchestra and Collon offered musical examples, which sounded thin, not enough strings, and there may well have been fewer in relation to the numbers that took part in the complete performance, which had greater body, Collon sculpting an impressive rendition, eccentricity not being one of his trademarks, very well played by a memorised ensemble. There are though enigmas in the score, not least the tempo for the very end – Bernstein and Previn sprint, Masur is massive and robotic, “you will rejoice” – with Mravinsky, below, the closest we will get to the work as it first appeared, rapturously received. Collon and his musicians (very spacious in the third-movement Largo and MOR come the final throw of the dice, in-keeping with his decisions elsewhere) treated it as a Symphony, rewardingly.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002h0l0