composer insight

shostakovich

“I was born later than Shostakovich, so I did not live through the years of mass terror in the Soviet Union as he did,” says Semyon Bychkov. “But nevertheless I understand the way of life he experienced and identify with it. I can even identify with his weaknesses. I can understand how someone so ill, so frightened, so unhappy, so alone, could say, ‘You want me to join the party? I’ll sign, just leave me alone. You want me to sign the letter against Solzhenitsyn? I’ll sign it.’ Quite frankly it’s not for us to judge, those of us who were not in his position.

“My father was a member of the Communist Party. He never betrayed anybody’s trust. He never spied or informed on anyone. Am I going to condemn him for joining the Party? He was 19 years old, in the army, and, like all of the others, became a member of the Communist Party before going to fight and possibly get killed. Was he supposed to say, ‘I’ll lay down my life for my country, but, please, I won’t join the party’?

“Imagine if Shostakovich had been such a saint, the chances are we would just have the First and the Fourth Symphonies, Lady Macbeth, and that would be about it. Or would you rather have the Shostakovich who was both a saint and a sinner, and then receive everything that he was able to give us? I tell you, I’ll take the saint and the sinner!

“In purely musical terms it would have been very easy, very natural, for him to go forward in the direction in which he was travelling up to the Fourth Symphony, before he was accused of ‘formalism’. Anyone with the depth of Shostakovich’s talent would have done it. But would every genius choose a way of expression that could be considered backwards? And still deliver the kind of message that he did, time and time again? This for me is a greater achievement, however curious I am as a musician to know what he might have written in other circumstances.”

“In the fourth of his series of studio recordings of Shostakovich symphonies, made after repeated live performances in Cologne, Bychkov (above) reveals himself as one of the most compelling Shostakovich interpreters of our time. The playing of his Cologne radio orchestra is more refined than that of the best Russian orchestras today, and his grasp of the music’s dramatic and emotional power has few equals.”
[Shostakovich Symphony No 4 / WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln / Avie]
Sunday Times, December 2006

“Of all the Shostakovian treats in his centenary year, few will match this instalment in Semyon Bychkov’s complete cycle of the symphonies with the Cologne Symphony Orchestra. The 11th symphony, commemorating the St Petersburg revolution of 1905, is one of those equivocal works. Well received at its 1957 Russian premiere, it is now seen by many musical Kremlinologists as a coded message, burying sympathy for the victims of the Hungarian uprising beneath its conservative form. Either way, a memorably powerful performance.”
[Shostakovich Symphony No 4 / WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln / Avie]
The Observer, June 2006