Pleasant musical pairings have marked the Palm Beach Symphony’s programs since Gerard Schwarz became music director in 2019. In what might have been the best concert I have ever heard the ensemble give, however, it performed a startling contrast of American show tunes and what is widely acknowledged to be a musical depiction of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
The Palm Beach Symphony is doing well. This season it has increased its concert offerings by 20 percent, even as many American performing companies contract their performances or disappear altogether. The optimist might point out that we have never had so lively a national scene in classical music. No realist, however, can ignore South Florida’s rise as a national cultural hub. Is there any wonder? This season, the Symphony began with an opening night audience five times larger than it was a decade ago, and with a mailing list over 25 times larger. The Palm Beach Opera, which shares the same performing space at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach, is also setting record sales and recently received the largest philanthropic gift in its history.
It only made sense that the Palm Beach Symphony should draw on top talent to fill the general program of its masterworks series, which presents a star soloist in a suitable musical selection alongside a fairly traditional selection of repertoire favorites. In this concert, for the first time the soloist was a vocalist, but not just any vocalist—it was, in fact, ‘America’s Mezzo’ Susan Graham, legendary for her performances across the operatic firmament but also in jazzy tunes of the American Songbook. Graham remains in excellent voice, even if she has given up a number of her best roles, and the program gave a splendid overview of her career. One only missed any reminder of her triumphs in the operas of Richard Strauss.
Mozart set the mood for the first part of her recital, with a brisk but warm playing of the overture from The Marriage of Figaro by Maestro Schwarz. He proved a truly sensitive collaborator in that opera’s two mezzo arias for the trouser part of Cherubino, Count Almaviva’s teenage page boy who, for reasons of operatic convention, is played by a woman. Graham, who stands at around six feet, has performed the trouser repertoire throughout her career with thoroughly convincing performances. Here she perfectly portrayed the delicate balance between animus and anima that the character needs to reflect the paradox of romantic ardor and halting inexperience. “Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio” is a literal admission that Cherubino knows neither who he is nor what he is doing as he tries to navigate hormones that leave him literally hot and cold. “Voi, che sapete” is a naïve confidence that Countess Almaviva and her maid Susanna—older, wiser women—know what love is and can tell him whether he has the self-possession to master it.
Graham followed her frank but graceful delivery of Cherubino’s hormonal moments with the more sophisticated “Deh per questo istante solo” from Mozart’s final opera, La Clemenza di Tito. The aria is delivered to the opera’s titular Roman Emperor Titus by his friend Sesto, another trouser part, who has just led a rebellion on behalf of a woman both he and the Emperor love. Sentenced to death, the character tries to overcome the drama of betrayal to remind the Emperor of their former affection just after being sentenced to death. Sesto does eventually prevail—the opera is about Titus’s clemency, after all, and was commissioned to celebrate the Habsburg Emperor Leopold II’s coronation as King of Bohemia. It is a tough moment that Graham’s instrument delivered superbly.
No less impressive was Graham’s move into both lighter and heavier fare, again showcased masterfully by Schwarz’s superb conducting. “Vilja,” a charming meditation on seduction meant as entertainment for party guests in Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow, was a participatory effort, with Graham directing the audience to join her in the choruses. “Ah, ah, je vais mourir” from Berlioz’s Les Troyens moved in a more serious direction, as Graham tackled Cassandra’s death and farewell to the city of Carthage, which her beloved Aeneas abandons, along with her, on his way to found Rome. The emotions of all the previous selections paled in comparison to the romantic indulgence found in this most versatile exploration of Graham’s instrument.
A welcome breathing space came with a splendid playing of Claude Debussy’s short symphonic poem Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, a masterpiece of musical impressionism that unrolled mellifluously. Graham treated it as a kind of transition to the American music that rose in the wake of impressionism as it yielded to expressionism. George Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm” and Richard Rodgers’s “The Sound of Music” filled the hall with nostalgia for a more confident America. Graham’s encore “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” brought the expected sighs of warm recognition.
The second half of the program was devoted to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in E minor. Perhaps music’s least fortunate child prodigy, Shostakovich had already been ‘canceled’ twice in the slippery realm of Soviet cultural politics by the time he composed it in his mid-forties. In 1936, an editorial in Pravda written or inspired by Stalin himself had denounced his second opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which was banished from the stage and ended his career in the genre. The high-level denunciation left Shostakovich in fear for his life in the years of Stalin’s purges, which claimed the lives of many of his arts colleagues and sent many others to prison. Shostakovich survived to write his most celebrated symphonies, which were symbols of wartime resistance to Nazi Germany, but after World War II he again fell afoul of the authorities, who believed his music was ‘formalist’ and not sufficiently national or politically correct in idiom. From 1948, when he lost his Conservatory post, he was again marginalized. He only approached symphonic-scale composition again after Stalin’s death in March 1953.
Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony dates from July to October of the year of the dictator’s demise. It premiered that December. Its first “moderato” movement starts softly in the lower strings before building to a kind of dance with clarinet and flute solos. The effect seems to announce something akin to “I am back,” with great sincerity replacing the ambiguity the composer used to protect himself in his Stalin-era works. Shostakovich’s biographer Solomon Volkov claimed that the second, allegro, movement is a musical depiction of Stalin himself. With its brash military themes and relentless percussion, this is certainly plausible. Left-wing academic scholars of Soviet music have played down this interpretation, citing Volkov’s perceived unreliability elsewhere, but they have an agenda of their own, which does not permit cultural criticism of the Soviet experiment or their belief that Russian culture is teleologically revolutionary in content. Evidence refutes them in too many areas to accept their critique at face value, and none has presented any counterevidence refuting it. It is, moreover, hard to believe that Shostakovich would not take the first chance he had to reassert his creative life and offer something unflattering about the man who had tortured his conscience and person for twenty years.
In case there were any doubts, the third, allegretto, movement introduces an unsettled theme following a motif of the notes D, E-flat, C, and B. In German notation, they spell “DSCH,” or a short-form signature of “D. Schostakowitsch,” as the composer’s name is transliterated in that language. A series of solo horn notes in turn spell “Elmira,” a reference to his muse Elmira Nazirova, who had studied with Shostakovich and remained close to him, entering into weekly correspondence as he wrote the symphony but denying any romance. The finale, which opens in a pensive andante, proceeds to another symbolization of Stalin in the form of a Georgian folk dance, but is resolutely crushed by the DSCH figure’s bold reappearance in a sunny conclusion.
Maestro Schwarz said before the performance that he favors Volkov’s interpretation, and he led the piece with a determination that underscored the nervy string caricatures of the dictator in contrast with the warm brass that gives Shostakovich his vindication.
