Party Faithful

Party Faithful is a remarkable concert programme, presenting two symphonies – both Aotearoa premieres – by 20^th-century masters. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 20 The First of May, and Benjamin Britten’s Symphony for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 68 both emerged from complex times in the artists’ careers, when each composer was publicly celebrated yet privately vulnerable. The two men were near exact contemporaries: while Shostakovich navigated his perilous acclaim under the shadow of Stalin’s purges, Britten lived a precarious double life in England – a semi-closeted gay man, who nevertheless enjoyed the official patronage and personal friendship of the British Royal Family.

We open with Britten’s Symphony for Cello and Orchestra, an intellectually demanding work composed for the legendary Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Soloist Lev Sivkov joins the orchestra, and from the outset commands the stage. The piece unfolds as a series of musical affirmations and challenges that threaten to destabilise the work, before once again allowing the soloist enough momentum to counterbalance the orchestra. Sivkov’s characteristically intense style extracts each phrase with precision, switching deftly between tones in an assortment of grainy, breathy, and rumbling theme-fragments. He fires volleys only to cut them off abruptly, or detonates hard-struck chords only to demur and dapple us with a warm, golden cadenza. The audience is engrossed, and even Sivkov’s fellow musicians seated around him seem transfixed by his playing.

By the time Shostakovich composed the symphony featured in tonight’s programme, his friend and fellow composer Mikhail Kvadri – who had received the dedication of his extraordinary First Symphony – had already been executed. Fittingly then, the Shostakovich we hear in this Third Symphony brims with political contempt and anxiety. The work uses a single-movement structure, with marches, brass flourishes, and lyrical passages tripping over each other in their desperation to proclaim the praises of the Soviet State, without a single theme repeated. The conclusion is a driven and disquieting fanfare, culminating in a compelling choral section from the Orpheus Choir.