The Shostakovich “Babi Yar” Symphony #13 turned out to be a better performance
than some of us thought it would be. In fact, I'd say it was one of the best
things we've done in a long time … but let's go back to the beginning and see
how it evolved.
The rehearsals of this work were … boring. The vocal part, which is men only, is unison throughout except for two big chords that occur somewhere in the middle of the work. These chords sound like an “Amen”, but I think the word there is actually something else. At any rate, after a while you begin to feel like you'd kill for a triad. And there's a lot of Russian. I mean, a real lot of Russian, and learning it is tedious, to say the least. Marianna Simpson was her usual implacable self, although she's so nice and enthusiastic that you can't get mad at her for drilling us so unmercifully. The piano reduction gives one some idea that the orchestra may do something pretty interesting, but of course it's not an orchestra, no matter how amazing Scott is.
And then there were the orchestra rehearsals. Parts of the work were being taken quite a bit faster than we had rehearsed them, which didn't exactly help either the Russian or our self confidence – and the soloist was not making things easy for us. In a number of places we had gotten accustomed to getting our pitches from the solo line (as played by Scott), but in our orchestra rehearsals he was marking almost all the time, and his marking technique was shading toward “spoken”, which means that the pitches were very hard to discern. Again, this did not exactly help our confidence, and going into the performance I was definitely feeling a bit worried about what was going to happen. And, added to that, the orchestra was not really playing at its best during the rehearsals. About the only thing you could say was that they were loud.
And then came the performances, and it was magic. The soloist actually started singing – I’m pretty sure we’d never heard him full voice in a lot of the work – and the orchestra was … nothing short of magnificent. I don’t think we’ve ever heard them play much better than that. I said as much during a break in the last concert to Erik Halen and Brinton Smith (Associate Concertmaster and Principal Cello), and the latter said, “Yeah, we always excel at dark, moody music about death …”. But it wasn’t all dark – the last movement is just plain pretty – and I love the way it ends with Scott delicately playing on the celesta the theme, or a slight variation of the theme, that previously has been in the strings and woodwinds -- and then that little "bong" on the huge chime from Brian. It's a good ending to a pretty monumental symphony. I even came to appreciate the triple-fortes in the first movement where the bass drum, which I'm fairly near, seemed to be rearranging the position of my heart and lungs.
Another memorable feature of these performances was that the poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, gave a reading from the stage, before the performance, of the poetry from the first movement – which is about the genocide at Babi Yar and the Russian spirit. It was hard to hear from where we were because the sound system is distorted back there, but it sounded like he was very animated and moving. I think he did it differently each night – for example, the second night was, as far as I could hear, all English except for the first couple lines, whereas the third performance was the reverse – all Russian except for the last line. He was also a hoot during the ovation. During the reading he was dressed in a suit that looked like lizard skin (is that actually possible??), but he came out for the bows dressed like he came from his sitting room, in an old patched jacket. And he smooched the ladies in the orchestra. I think if we’d had women in the chorus he would have been back there with us!
All in all, a very memorable and worthwhile concert.