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Unwrapping
The Shostakovich Enigma Philip
Kennicott
First we learn the Third Secret of Fatima, and now cellist Lynn Harrell has taken all the fun out of the great Shostakovich mystery. Harrell, the soloist in last night's National Symphony Orchestra performance of Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 2, announces in the program notes that the music is manifestly about the kind of "bitterness" and "despair" that the Soviet musical establishment supposedly wouldn't tolerate. By telling us up front what he thinks the music is about, the cellist has removed some of the enigma that surrounds any Shostakovich performance. Anyone who listens to the music, bleak and inward and weirdly disjointed, could figure out that it's not about a picnic in Red Square. But Harrell's statement is really meant to signal where he stands on what has become one of the most productively unproductive cottage industries of contemporary musicology: the debate over the composer's true political sympathies. Shostakovich for Dummies begins with this lesson: The composer was either a political milquetoast who caved in to the Soviet establishment (whenever necessary) by writing musical agitprop, or a sibylline character who encoded anti-Soviet messages into his seemingly Stalin-friendly symphonies. This was exciting dinner party talk back when there was still a Soviet Union; it became even more so in 1979 with the emergence of diaries purportedly dictated by Shostakovich in which he revealed the secret messages of his music. But now, with nobody left alive to haul to justice no matter what the truth is discovered to be, it has the stale flavor of discussing whether Schubert was homosexual, or the identity of Beethoven's secret loves. The detritus of this debate, however, is still with us, mostly in the form of self-consciously arch and ironic performances. Harrell's performance in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, fortunately, was neither; his stage demeanor, however, was faintly ridiculous in its seismic responses to the composer's supposedly politically laden themes. Intent on letting us know that he knows what Shostakovich was really saying, Harrell emoted even when he wasn't playing, at one point wincing and jerking when a percussion blast suggested the sound of a gunshot. Not to be outdone, guest conductor Gerard Schwarz cued percussion in the last movement with his thumb and forefinger extended: more unnecessary gunplay. The Shostakovich second cello concerto is austere and forbidding music, as alien to the aesthetic of the first cello concerto (premiered only seven years earlier) as early Beethoven quartets are to the late ones. The music is broken and jagged; despair is counterpoised not with its opposite, joy, but with a kind of slap-happy rage. Harrell is a very fine player, and he captures the nuances of this music. Good performances like this one make Shostakovich's secret intentions irrelevant.
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