The Times (UK)
By Rebecca Franks
★★★★☆
"With fluid, unshowy gestures the Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda let the music tell its own storyWith fluid, unshowy gestures the Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda let the music tell its own story"
Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony emerges from darkness. This poem of suffering was written between July and September 1943. The Nazis were in retreat, the Russians were triumphant. Stalin wanted upbeat trumpets and drums. Shostakovich gave him those, but, ironically, enveloped in a vast symphony lamenting the scourge of war, the trauma, the emotional toll and the millions of lives lost. Shock, sadness, anger, despair, fear, helplessness, numbness, the meaningless of life — it’s all there.
And it was all there in Gianandrea Noseda’s outstanding performance with the London Symphony Orchestra. With fluid, unshowy gestures, the Italian conductor let the music tell its own story. Of course, that’s an illusion. A symphony on this scale doesn’t play itself. Noseda found the right tempos, drew out the unusual colours and textures of the orchestration and caught every mood. From sepulchral basses to intense violins, the strings were formidable, as were the wind and brass solos — shrieking E flat clarinet and piccolo, eloquent cor anglais and bassoon, an ethereal horn.
The Eighth starts in C minor and heads to C major for the finale, but this is not a tragedy-to-triumph narrative in the Beethovenian mould. Shostakovich gives us a quieter, more equivocal victory. The fade to black has been interpreted as disappearance into nothingness, but here those soft moments felt like a weakly flickering candle. This glimmer of life, not even necessarily of hope, said nothing more and nothing less than I am still here, I survive.