1942: Shostakovich as a fire-warden in the besieged city of Leningrad
Friday, October 24, 2025
Bovard Auditorium, 3551 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA
This week at the USC Thornton School of Music Leonard Slatkin has been preparing this S-composer concert, opening with his Hiroshima-commissioned Schubertiade less than a week since conducting its U.S. premiere. It’s an intriguing piece, on several levels, including Slatkin’s invented story involving Schubert, uninvited guests, and a transfer to a later era. Quotations include his final Piano Sonata, played on its designated instrument, selections from the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, a song about a fish (no fowls) and another, a lilting serenade on muted trumpet, and the String Quintet, with Slatkin’s original music binding the whole very effectively, played eagerly.
Shostakovich’s ‘Leningrad’ Symphony (No.7) can seem long-winded and bombastic. Not on this occasion. Slatkin found a clear-sighted wholeness to the four movements, and had obviously connected to the students, the biting attack of the strings at the start said as much, the first movement with ideal momentum to accommodate the repetitive march, swelled by side drum(s), banged-out tambourine, heavy brass, braying trumpets – strings always clear – reaching a perfectly-calibrated-towards huge climax. The second movement was rhythmically crisp, the third alternated raw woodwinds and tangy strings, desolate and eruptive, and the Finale, striving with energy, rhythmic panache and vivid percussive pizzicatos, reached its triumphant goal-directed close like a phoenix rising with inevitability, no crudeness but a joy at reaching freedom, the music, players and your battered (sleepless) old reviewer enriched. At sixty-seven minutes, relatively swift if persuasive, Slatkin’s reading was coincidentally of a similar length to a memorable Proms performance from years back conducted by Sir Edward Downes.
This Prom’s second half was the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony.