Symphony No. 11 in G Minor "The Year 1905"

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From the start, critical opinion has been split on Shostakovich's Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103 ("The Year 1905"). Is it of a piece with the cinematic potboilers Shostakovich wrote to get himself back into the good graces of the Soviet government after his denunciation by Stalin's cultural henchmen? Or was it, following the thinking of the composer's revisionist biographer Solomon Volkov, a subtle expression of support for the Hungarian uprising against Soviet domination in 1956, just as Shostakovich's symphony was being composed? The genius of this reading by Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic, recorded live, is that it doesn't really matter. The work is strongly programmatic, really to a greater degree than any other Shostakovich symphony, and lacks the venomous scherzo generally characteristic of the composer. Jurowski takes the listener through it with inexorable forward motion, clocking in at 13:33 in the first movement as compared with a good deal longer in many interpretations and more than 20 minutes in one of the symphony's most famous recordings, that of Mstislav Rostropovich with the London Symphony in 2004. For Jurowski, the mood of the work is less memorial than inexorable, and while listeners are free to accept or reject this, it is hard to argue that the conductor succeeds anything less than brilliantly in realizing his aims. The highlight is the truly shattering finale, where the Southbank Centre audience explodes at the end; so will listeners even in their own homes, and Jurowski gets extraordinary support from the LPO's engineering staff: the layers of sound shimmer uncannily. For Jurowski, the score is indeed cinematic, but, he asks, so what?
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