L.A. Philharmonic Electrifies Shostakovich’s Eleventh

If Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony were a piece of sculpture rather than a piece of music, it surely would have gotten its head knocked off by now, just as so many Social Realist statues of Lenin have since the Communists lost control over Russia. The symphony is subtitled “The Year 1905,” and over the course of an hour it recounts with wide-screen cinematic verisimilitude the events in St. Petersburg that led to the Russian Revolution. As a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, the symphony was ridiculed by Russian dissidents for its cheap Soviet propaganda, and it also caused the composer’s reputation to take a dip in the West.

But music, no matter how populist, does not reproduce reality as specifically as do the visual arts or literature. There are always alternate ways to hear, and the more common claim now is that Shostakovich, who didn’t complete the symphony until 1956, had a hidden program alluding to the Soviet invasion of Hungary that year.

But whatever the politics behind the symphony were, time has healed most wounds. When the Los Angeles Philharmonic finished its first performance of the symphony Friday night, the audience in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion leapt to its feet in excitement. It is graphic, visceral music and there was electricity in the way Yakov Kreizberg conducted it. The black sheep of the composer’s 15 symphonies hardly seemed problematic after all.

Certainly it helped that Kreizberg, who was born in St. Petersburg 38 years ago but emigrated to the United States in 1976, was in no mood to stoop to theatrical gimmickry. That is not to say that the conductor, who was making his Music Center debut, backed off from carefully evoking early morning mist in the glassy opening music or failed to raise the roof when folk song melodies get mowed down by the spectacular onslaught of martial brass and percussion. Indeed Kreizberg uses his baton like a saber, enforcing razor sharp attacks. A strong sense of propulsion is also a musical character trait.

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But those attacks and that propulsion were for the sake of music. In the second movement, for instance, Kreizberg translated the hysteria of blatant battle music into raw energy. The tempo was incredibly fast, and because of that the structure became unusually clear. The orchestra was here a marvel.

The earlier part of the evening was musically unrelated, but that was mainly through circumstance. The cancellation of violinist Thomas Zehetmair, who was ill, also meant scrapping Mozart’s Fifth Violin Concerto, which has a martial Turkish finale. Cho-Liang Lin, the last-minute soloist replacement, selected, instead, Mozart’s more ornamental Third Violin Concerto. His playing was admirable--phrasing, intonation and tone were also beyond reproach--but not memorable. He plays as he always does, without surprise. The cadenzas by Raymond Leppard stretch Mozart’s idiom ever so slightly, and Lin played them with spirit.

Kreizberg brought many of the same qualities of his Shostakovich conducting to Mozart--again the attacks and rhythms were crisp and aggressive--and the music sounded new and fresh. If he made Shostakovich’s symphony, which tries too hard to be theater, seem symphonically sophisticated, he also made Mozart’s concerto, which is a slight and early work, seem to be about a great deal. Currently music director of the Komische Oper in Berlin and principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony in England, Kreizberg is a conductor on the way up and rightfully so.