Benjamin Britten’s Russia connection
An odd reflection to have at the start of a weekend dedicated to Benjamin Britten’s Russian influences at Snape Maltings, home to the world-renowned Aldeburgh Festival, but Benjamin Britten disliked a lot of Russian music (Rachmaninov, Borodin, Mussorgsky) and quite a few Russian composers personally, notably, Stravinsky, though he was a great admirer of Tchaikovsky and later of Shostakovich. What is sometimes overlooked as well is that he had something of a soft spot for Soviet Russia until surprisingly late in the day.
Over two beautifully sunny days on the edges of the Alde river in Suffolk, such ambivalences did not stop me enjoying the music of composers as varied as Prokofiev (Five Poems of Anna Akhmatova sung by a very full voiced Julia Sitkovetsky accompanied by Roger Vignoles) and Rachmaninov (Six Romances, again sung by Sitkovetsky, and his lush Third Symphony played by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Jac van Steen). But in volume and sheer musical quality, the weekend – held over the 19th and 20th of October – was unsurprisingly dominated by works by Britten and Shostakovich. Indeed the whole programme of concerts revolved thematically around just three men and one woman: Britten’s relationship with the Russian cellist Slava Rostropovich, and to a lesser extent his wife the singer Galina Vishnevskaya, and with the musical titan of Soviet Russia, Dmitri Shostakovich.
Key to these relationships was a concert in London in 1960 – re-enacted at Snape last month – which a reluctant Britten was persuaded to attend because the celebrated Russian cellist was to play Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. Britten was entranced by Rostropovich’s incredibly skilful playing and made this clear to Shostakovich by constantly nudging him in his ribs (they were seated together in a concert hall box) to indicate the passages he most admired. A triangular friendship was born that evening that would survive until their deaths.
The triangle was not only about music but also about Soviet Russia, the crossing point of these extraordinary personalities and talents. It was entirely appropriate therefore that the first symphonic concert of the weekend, under the skilled direction of van Steen and the vibrant playing of the Welsh Orchestra, should have opened with a very short but historically resonant piece, Russian Funeral, written by Britten in 1936 and originally performed at a London Labour Union concert to mark the resistance to Fascism shown under the Spanish Republic. Britten was then firmly on the left politically, still sympathetic to the “Soviet experiment” notwithstanding Stalin’s show trials and far removed from his eventual evolution into a conservative establishment figure, Lord Britten, OM, etc.
For Shostakovich life in the 1930s and later was more constrained and more frightening as he sought to find a way to retain musical integrity while tacking to the cultural demands of the pre- and post-war Soviet Union. Not until 1953 and Stalin’s death did something of a “thaw” emerge and even then only temporarily. The youngest of the three men, Rostropovich, had not himself known the privations of the 1930s, but his turn would come under the more benign but still dictatorial rule of Khrushchev and Brezhnev.
After Russian Funeral we had a kind of Russian renaissance in the Maltings concert hall with a performance of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, the first fruit of the short-lived cultural “thaw” in 1953. The Welsh Orchestra gave it their all, as those unable to attend the concert can hear in the Radio 3 recording broadcast subsequently, especially in the stunning rhythmic push of the second movement. Most commentators now see the 10th as the final fruit of Shostakovich’s trilogy of war symphonies (the 7th, 8th and 9th) and it is the Second World War which was a point of intense, echoing, resonance for Shostakovich, an acute admirer of the War Requiem which he rated higher than Mozart’s, and Britten: the former a musical patriot in the siege of Leningrad, the latter a pacifist patriot returning from the US to wartime England.
But in the autumnal quietness of Snape the lynchpin drawing Britten, Shostakovich and Rostropovich together was the cello. Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto – the other product of 1953 – was given vital new life by the brilliant young cellist, Laura van der Heijden who, improbably, graduated from Cambridge only this year. Her slight frame seemingly designed solely to give support to her strongly deployed fingers, she sat beside the overwhelming bulk of the conductor, confident and supremely rhythmic. But the glories of the cello didn’t stop there: we were blessed with a second wonderful and more established cellist in the form of Alban Gerhardt, who, in a second week-end concert, delivered a performance of Britten’s Symphony for Cello and Orchestra that would surely have pleased Rostropovich as much as Britten. And Gerhardt showed enormous skill and subtlety in stunning solo performances also of Britten’s First and Third Cello Suites in the Britten Studio at Snape. I will not easily or willingly forget his rendering of the final passages of the Passacaglia of the Third Suite.
In their last years each member of the Russian triangle gave support in one way or another to the others. Britten on a final visit to Moscow required the Soviet authorities to allow Rostropovich to play Shostakovich’s music, at a time when both men were out of favour with Brezhnev and his gang, as a condition for his visit. Rostropovich in turn teased more works for cello out of Britten, and, after his exile, a result of his open support for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, became his fast friend in Aldeburgh where he frequently performed for him. Shostakovich – though less politically courageous than his fellow Russian – always championed Britten’s music in Russia, even when relations between the Soviet Union and the UK were most troubled.
And perhaps Britten, his admiration for the “Soviet experiment” having faded, though even in 1968 he refused to publicly condemn the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, had managed through his friendships with Shostakovich and Rostropovich to see more clearly the true nature of Soviet Russia, with eyes unvarnished by the idealism or naivety of the 1930s. Certainly it seemed so as we listened to the rich musical fruits of the triangle formed in 1960 and performed amid the swaying reed beds on the Suffolk coast.