In a gripping evening of uncompromising music, the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) confronted the darkest chapters of 20th-century history. Titled “A Dark Century,” the program’s centerpiece was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, a searing denunciation of Soviet oppression and a lament for the 33,000 Jews massacred by the Nazis at Babi Yar near Kyiv in 1941.
Enduring Memorial to a Tragedy
The symphony, composed in 1962, sets poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who had boldly memorialized the Babi Yar atrocity the previous year. Sadly, the site remains contested ground – a museum planned for the massacre’s 80th anniversary was destroyed by a Russian missile in 2022.
Bass soloist Alexander Roslavets brought both velvety tone and incisive diction to Yevtushenko’s texts, evoking the horrors of antisemitism and the stifling realities of Soviet life. The men of the London Philharmonic Choir made potent contributions in the later movements, at one point leaning forward to address the audience in an eerie whisper.
Unsparing Depictions of Oppression
The five-movement symphony spares no aspect of Soviet society, moving from the Babi Yar atrocity to biting satires of conformity, cowardice, and censorship. Conductor Andrey Boreyko led an intense, if occasionally uneven, orchestral performance that held nothing back in emotional rawness.
“Shostakovich’s music rages and weeps with an intensity that time has not dimmed. If anything, tonight’s performance felt more urgent than ever.”
– Concertgoer at the Royal Festival Hall
Unflinching First Half
The evening began on an equally uncompromising note with Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw, in which Roslavets delivered a harrowing spoken narration against the composer’s jagged, expressionist music. It continued with a work by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a Polish-Jewish composer who fled to the USSR during World War II.
The great violinist Gidon Kremer, now in his late 70s, brought mournful integrity to Weinberg’s solo part, spinning a sweet, singing tone in the quieter moments. As an encore, Kremer offered a haunting Serenade by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov.
Music That Demands Witness
In a time of renewed brutality and oppression in the lands Shostakovich and Weinberg once inhabited, this was an evening of music that demanded to be heard as both remembrance and warning. The LPO rose to the challenge with playing of unflinching emotional commitment.
As the music’s last tortured strains faded away, what lingered was a renewed sense of music’s power to bear witness – and to demand that we never forget.
