South Florida Classical Review

Pablo Mielgo conducted the Symphony of the Americas Tuesday night in Fort Lauderdale.

The Symphony of the Americas continued its season Tuesday evening in Fort Lauderdale with artistic director Pablo Mielgo leading  a single work: Dmitri Shostakovich’s massive Symphony No. 7 “Leningrad,” Op. 60, in C Major.

Shostakovich’s 80-minute, wartime work is intimately tied to its historical circumstances under an oppressive  regime characterized by heavy censorship, both explicit and implicit. The composer’s own thoughts are buried among supposedly hidden musical messages, contradictions between public and private comments, scores of anecdotes of varying reliability, and a dictated autobiography of dubious authenticity.

Nevertheless, there are a few concrete facts to guide us. Shostakovich dedicated the work to his city of Leningrad, the contemporaneous Soviet name for St. Petersburg, which was under siege by Nazi forces, a standoff that would last nearly 900 days, leaving the city in ruins and over a million civilians dead. Shostakovich also titles to each of the symphony’s four movements, which he scrapped before its premiere – “War,” “Reminiscences,” “Russia’s Vastness,” and “Victory.”

The Seventh Symphony was received with great acclaim in Russia, with the government taking special measures to organize performances and radio broadcasts. In the US, the premiere, which was broadcast on radio,  initially met with great acclaim, understandably so for an embattled country which was then a comrade-in-arms against the Nazis. Postwar, people seemed embarrassed about the work and the symphony met with critical disdain. Even Toscanini, who conducted the U.S. premiere, when shown a copy of the score, said, “I conducted that?!”

This was partly due to the fact that the work does not represent a symphony in the traditional sense, with its opposition of ideas and gradual untangling of the thematic material’s consequences. Instead, its long-spun melodic lines and frequent ostinati make it a massive four-movement tone poem, a dramatic musical account of the stories, scenes, and thoughts of those who lived through that devastating moment in history.

In the Amaturo Theater at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, this is exactly the effect that was given. It felt as though the audience were being shown a black-and-white war movie, a rerun of some cinematic classic dug up from a Hollywood archive. 

Everyone knows the ending – C minor switches to C Major and tragedy becomes triumph. But the ending is not the point. The audience is instead captivated by the first 75 minutes of terror and heartbreak, remembering the victims and hoping that no one is made to experience such suffering again.

Though the opening of the symphony is ostensibly in C Major, the tragedy is already present from the opening bars which will later signal devastation: a short rhythmic motif in the trumpets and timpani on the dominant and tonic notes of g and c. Long lyrical woodwind solos add an expressive touch. Antonio Urrutia excelled in the many oboe solos, with which he displayed an impressive emotional range. A piccolo solo, played by Alyssa Mena, was one of the evening’s most poignant moments, with the instrument diving into its hollow, lonely-sounding lower register.

The long series of variations in the middle of the first movement was handled with impressive control by Mielgo, save for a few quickly-corrected issues of rhythmic synchronization. Percussionist Mark Perez kept the banal snare drum ostinato just at the threshold of perceptibility, as a latent, hidden threat, until it engulfs the music in militaristic terror. (This evening-length work requires a massive ensemble, so the orchestra, was joined by extra brass players from high schools from around South Florida.)

Shostakovich originally entitled the second movement “Reminiscences.” A series of dances, it seems to represent recollections of the city before the siege. This music is somewhere between folksy and aristocratic, and the orchestra handled the rhythmic changes with confidence. There is a short militaristic episode, more heroic in contrast to the terror of the first movement. But the music fades away into memory after a magical passage for bass clarinet, played by Jesse Winslow, accompanied by flutes and harp.

The orchestra displayed a special sense of drama in the expansive third movement, and Mielgo brought a wonderful range of color out of the ensemble. The music unfolds slowly, eventually building up to a terrifying climax. At one point, an ostinato figure played across the strings and woodwinds recalls an ambulance or air-raid siren. 

The fourth movement begins without pause. The musicians captured all of the intensity and excitement of the music, though there were a few rhythmic hiccups. The often-hidden horns were exposed in a special unison line, accompanied by sparse chords from the rest of the orchestra. Finally, C Major is reached, though this is not a wholehearted triumph – as the trombones continue to play the movement’s main theme, which hits E flat, A flat, and B flat, the three key notes of C minor. The orchestra seemed to have saved their energy for this climactic ending, which resounded through the hall with new splendor and elicited raucous applause.

The intimate Amaturo venue provided the perfect acoustic for the symphony. Shostakovich has a tendency to write for each of the orchestral groups separately. Mielgo balanced these changes in the orchestra marvelously, avoiding some of the jarring switches that can happen in larger halls.

The Symphony of the Americas repeats this program 2 p.m. Sunday, March 16. sota.org

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