The main work in this Aurora Orchestra concert was Shostakovich’s 14th Symphony, dating from 1969, and written while its composer was seriously ill in hospital with both polio and a heart condition. Part symphony, part song cycle, for soprano and bass soloists, strings and percussion, it forms a bitter meditation on mortality that sets texts by four writers who themselves died young in violent or unjust circumstances. Shostakovich thought it his greatest score. It’s uncompromising stuff, uncomfortable to listen to.
Approaches inevitably differ as to how to treat it, with some interpreters (Gianandrea Noseda, for instance, with the LSO, at the Barbican earlier this year) primarily suggesting bleak, world-weary exhaustion. Nicholas Collon, in contrast, sounded notably angry in a performance that often raged at the dying of the light. Mordant humour pervaded the tavern where death dances the Malagueña with the drinkers, and time literally seemed to run out in the frantic duet for the desperate Lorelei and the Bishop who desires her.
Collon’s soloists were Peter Rose, admirably declamatory, though it took a few minutes for his voice to find its focus, and Elizabeth Atherton, a more lyrical singer than the many dramatic sopranos who have made the work their own, though she was also fiercely intense in The Suicide, and both rapturous and obscene in On Watch, with its underlying theme of incest. Performing the work in a small venue like Kings Place gives neither instrumentalists nor audience anywhere to hide, and the playing was terrific in its precision, detail and drive.
Its companion pieces, played together without a break, were again works for strings, predominantly or wholly, the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge by Benjamin Britten (to whom Shostakovich’s 14th is actually dedicated). With smallish forces, the Mahler sounded notably beautiful, if coolly lucid rather than sentimental or impassioned. Britten’s early variations, meanwhile, each effectively a genre piece in a different style, were done with wonderful panache, without losing sight of the bittersweet emotions that sometimes surface amid the exuberance.
