David Ward is out and about at Manchester's Shostakovich centenary celebration all this weekend. In his final instalment from the festivities, he reflects that it's gone well - even if there was a bit too much sitting down ...
I've missed my favourite seventh prelude and fugue: it was played during a Russian Orthodox service at 8am today. Even I wasn't daft enough to get up that early.
"What does it all mean?" my wife regularly demands after a symphony. Last night she asked it about Shostakovich's fourth, played by the enormous BBC Philharmonic - I lost count at 120 players - conducted by Vassily Sinaisky (who calls the fourth one of the composer's "long and strong" ones). Sometimes I attempt an answer.
But I have no answers about number four, only my own questions: why that mad fizzing string fugue in the first movement? Why the rattle of castanet, wood block and drum at the end of the second? Why a finale in which single glockenspiel (?) notes rise into silence? Search me.
And there is, as Charles Ives might have said, another unanswered question: what did Shostakovich feel about withdrawing this symphony in 1936 and sticking it at the back of a drawer until 1961? That was three years before the 10th quartet performed with huge authority by the St Petersburg Quartet on Saturday afternoon: lyrical in the first movement, horribly vicious in the second.
After that I bailed out, but was back almost at first light today for a lecture by Gerard McBurney called "Listening to Music from the Soviet Union: Some Thoughts on Context and Significance". He began by denouncing his title as "appalling pretentiousness" and admitting that he could not get his notes out of his laptop. He then talked off an eloquent cuff for 70 minutes (longer than the fourth), giving a magisterial view of the contexts in which we hear Shostakovich's music. He had to rush through his coda; "I can never get anything said in under three hours," he explained.
Now I have fled. I'm developing Shostakovich bottom, which is not as bad as Wagner bottom but still injurious. My rear has felt nothing for three days but the green seats of the RNCM's opera theatre, the purple seats of its concert hall and the high stools of its cafe.
I need a walk. I need to look at the sky. Forgive me, Dmitri, but I have to go and look at a Pennine. And slog up one. If all goes well, I'll be back tonight for the 13th, 14th and 15th quartets, all so collectively despairing that McBurney murmurs: "Don't forget the razor blades for your wrists."
I'll listen with care, but won't worry if I can't work out what each quartet means. And even if I can, I'll bear in mind a warning from McBurney, quoting Beethoven: "Always remember the opposite may be true."
