We start in heaven and end with Stalin. So seemed the message of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal at their performance at Walt Disney Hall last Tuesday, Oct. 27. The performance, conducted by Rafael Payare, began with the contemporary “Elysium” and ended with an hour of Soviet misery.
“Elysium,” the first piece, was musically forgettable. However, its title, the name for the Greek afterlife reserved for heroes, created a solid contrast with the final piece: Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in E minor.
Seventy-four years ago, Shostakovich finished writing his 10th Symphony during the waning years of an authoritarian dictator’s rule, surrounded by paranoia and persecution, struggling to pay for the basic essentials of life, with secret police disappearing his colleagues in the middle of the night. Thankfully, all of these issues have been forever settled in 2026, and we can enjoy Shostakovich’s crushing, hour-long Symphony No. 10 in E minor independent of these considerations.
As Armenian-Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian remarked, the 10th is “a true symphony … a work of life-affirming [ideas] and of deep emotional and philosophical content.” No matter how familiar or unfamiliar the listener is with the secret messages woven throughout the piece’s four movements, each is immediately recognizable. Before attending the concert, reading the program notes and researching the circumstances of the work’s composition, I had no idea of the specific hidden meanings behind many of the symphony’s best moments. Yet even then, they were mercilessly effective.
The first movement begins unsure of itself. A melody in the lower strings arpeggiates (playing individual notes sequentially) chords whose harmonic functions are ambiguous. The upper strings drone on, holding to a single note until they, too, engage in ambivalent arpeggiation. The first real thematic idea is introduced by a plaintive solo clarinet, sounding remarkably similar to the main theme of “The Godfather,” but with none of the entertaining suspense. Shostakovich’s clarinet is pure lamentation.
Later in the movement, Shostakovich introduces a stunted waltz that never quite falls into the one-two-three rhythm that we expect. This symphony was first premiered in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), a city that had suffered particularly during the Great Patriotic War; the first movement is fittingly a stunning depiction of sorrow, suffering and perhaps most pessimistically, stasis.
The second movement, by contrast, confidently assumes a frenetic, harried and sardonic character. In the memoir — of heavily disputed veracity — “Testimony,” Shostakovich claimed that the second movement was a portrait of Joseph Stalin. Whether this were true or not, it perfectly illustrates the frenzied life of a leader who thought he would be assassinated until the day he died of a stroke face down in his own urine.
The third movement, eschewing the traditional symphonic structure that would insert a triple-meter dance, portrays the eternal isolation that Stalinist terror inculcated. There are three main musical ideas in the movement: a hobbled violin ditty and two musical cryptograms.
“Yet, we never hear Elmira’s theme again: Shostakovich’s muse has vanished. Even as the glorious E-major chords sound at the end, Shostakovich appears to tell us something somewhat unsavory: In order for any success against Stalinism, sacrifices must be made, and people must be left behind.”
One cryptogram is the classic D – E-flat – C – B (in the traditional German system, this spells out D – S – C – H), representing Shostakovich himself. The other, only recently decoded by musicologist Nelly Kravetz, is the languid horn call E – A – E – D – A (mixing solfège with letter names, this is E – La – Mi – Re – A), spelling out the first name of composer Elmira Nazirova, a close friend and rumored lover of Shostakovich. Over the course of the movement, the D – S – C – H and Elmira themes grow closer and closer together; however, each time they seem like they might come together, the first violin theme tears them asunder.
As I see it, the third movement is the most programmatic of any in the symphony, telling us a particular story with specific characters. Nazirova’s Georgian-Jewish-Azerbaijani ancestry is striking amidst the surrounding political context: The Soviet system repressed such minority identities, accusing them of fomenting anti-state nationalism and contravening the goal of a state entirely devoted to Stalin. For a Québécois orchestra to perform a piece that near-directly addresses this tension, soon after an American-Canadian deal fell apart over French-language protections, cannot help but feel targeted.
Were the symphony to end after three movements, we would be left with utter dismay. Fortunately, both Shostakovich and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal itself provides us some relief, distinguishing themselves most notably in the finale. I was impressed by the exuberance that Shostakovich and the orchestra could conjure after being left with the apparently interminable division of the third movement. All this was accomplished in 12 short minutes of the fourth movement, which ends in a triumphant E major after an hour of minor-key gloom and doom.
But Shostakovich does not leave us with unabated optimism. The fourth movement is often highlighted for the triumph of the returning D – S – C – H motif over a bed of turbulent strings; given the structure of the third movement, this would seem to suggest the triumph of the individual over a repressive dictatorship. Yet, we never hear Elmira’s theme again: Shostakovich’s muse has vanished. Even as the glorious E-major chords sound at the end, Shostakovich appears to tell us something somewhat unsavory: In order for any success against Stalinism, sacrifices must be made, and people must be left behind.
The Orchestra symphonique de Montréal is, obviously, not a regular fixture in the classical music scene of Southern California. Nevertheless, their contribution to our musical community cannot be understated: During a time when our two countries are both grappling with the incoherence and imbecility of a leader that rivals Stalin in his idiocy, Montréal brought some respite to the City of Angels.
Akshay Seetharam HM ’27 is an advocate for ignoring all music composed before 1820 and after 1870. Reading his column will probably give you an unfair advantage in solving his crosswords, which are now the longest-running way to waste your time in TSL.
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