Shostakovich, Symphony No. 6

I’m not a big reader of composer biographies. It always seemed to me more productive simply to dive into the music, which was the real focus of my interest. Of course, it’s useful to know something about the circumstances of the composer’s life and the context in which he wrote, but that doesn’t require an exhaustive biography.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), however, might present a good case for rethinking that. His life is intertwined with the politics and shifting sands of Soviet Russia. He would be periodically in favor and out of favor, seen as trying to please the authorities and resisting them. Some of his writing dabbled in the avant-garde, but his overall style was more neoclassical. Such contrary strains run through his life and his music. People now argue over what he really thought and what effect all of it had.

I mentioned a few months ago that I intended to listen to more Shostakovich, something I used to do regularly but less often in recent years, and I found myself coming back numerous times to his Sixth Symphony. Written in 1939, it has an unusually structure of three movements: a long and somewhat brooding first movement, followed by a scherzo that is both humorous and driven, and finishing with a wild galop. (We discussed the galop in the Performance Pick featuring Rossini’s William Tell Overture.)

The first movement clearly dominates (it runs about 21.5 minutes). It sustains a sense of introspection throughout with some remarkably lyrical and transparent writing particularly for the woodwinds, featuring all of them in prominent solo passages. In stark contrast, the exuberant energy in the last two movements might have gotten this work into my list of “music for boys.” But Shostakovich was already represented on that list, and you can’t include everything.

In contrast to the seriousness of the first movement, the conductor is clearly having a rollicking good time at the end.