Shostakovich Symphony No. 8 in C minor, Op. 65. Concertgebouw Orchestra / Bernard Haitink.

Decca digital (Full price) (LP) SXDL7621 (Cassette) KSXDC7621.

It will not, I hope, re-fuel the 'what does Shostakovich's music really mean?' controversy to say that the Eighth is quite clearly a 'War Symphony'. Indeed, the very fact that its huge opening movement is so clearly and so closely modelled on the corresponding movement of the Fifth Symphony makes of it almost avowedly an 'artist's response' to the experience of war, and therein lies the difficulty of performing the work. After the brooding sorrow of the Adagio, rising to heights of piercing eloquence, after the dreadful battle-engine of the Allegro has crushed everything in its path, after the adagio has returned, with a Mahlerian warning (menacingly schonen Trompeten) in its coda, what can possibly follow? Shostakovich takes the fefiant risk of not one but two savagely martial scherzos, in which it is easy to imagine that one sees goose-stepping and military exercises, hears the rattle of gunfire and the whistle and thud of falling shells. But the problem, after such an onslaught, of how to balance the almost self-sufficient first movement cannot be solved by a programme. Shostakovich's solution is not a radiant vision of future peace, nor an optimistic hymn to victory, nor even an equivocal gaze into the ruins from which life must be rebuilt. He chooses instead a by no means obviously programmatic passacaglia followed by a curiously un-final set of variations. I had thought his solution a failure; I am not so sure now, after hearing Haitink's passionately serious performance.

The passacaglia seems to deny the very nature of its form by being non-cumulative; the restless melody is heard a dozen times, generally in the bass, with not contrasting ideas of comparable strength of character—it can seem no more than a no doubt necessary but protracted winding down from the second and more malign of the scherzos, a prelude that takes an uncommonly long time to bring the disconcertingly innocent, Nielsen-like theme of the finale to birth. And if that happens the finale itself is almost bound to be a disappointment: Nielsen, one grumbles, might have invented the melody but he would have dispatched it in half the time, and would certainly not have offered it as a fitting counterpart to such a tremendous opening movement.

My doubts remain (and there are others: are not the shrieks of anguish elicited by the first Allegro rather histrionic gestures? Would not one scherzo have been ample?) but what Haitink does with the passacaglia removes some of them. It moves at just the right pace to seem extremely slow yet not stagnant (Previn's superb account on HMV does not quite manage this) and to allow a sense (one cannot avoid programmizing with Shostakovich) of almost extinguished strength reviving, a sense that is beautifully carried over into the finale, with its strangely moving homage to Tchaikovsky and its sombrely haunted coda. I had not thought of the passacaglia as a pivot before and am now wondering whether that finale is not a deliberate and audacious attempt to make a work that is programmatically and symphonically satisfying while remaining intentionally and inevitably unbalanced: I wonder.

As sheer sound the performance is a magnificent one: the marvellous power and sheen of the Concertgebouw's brass and the richness and delicacy of their strings are outstandingly well rendered by an exceptionally natural and atmospheric recording. Previn's performance is also very fine indeed; it is only in recorded sound (his strings given a little less attack than Haitink's), and in the revealing of rather more substance in the latter movements that Haitink surpasses him, and at one or two moments of gesticulating urgency in the first movement in Previn who does the surpassing.

MEO