BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/Vassily Sinaisky Royal Albert Hall, London ****
Shostakovich's Fourth is the most controversial of the composer's symphonies. Its history is grotesque. Under the weight of adverse criticism in Pravda (directed at his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk), Shostakovich withdrew the score in 1936, when the symphony was in rehearsal, and remained fiercely dismissive of the work until 1961, when a thaw in artistic policy permitted the first performance. Thereafter, he claimed that is was a far finer piece than many he had written, and that it depicted the fetid atmosphere of Russia when Stalin's purges were at their worst. Opening the Proms' Shostakovich retrospective, Vassily Sinaisky and the BBC Philharmonic allowed us to experience the music's overwhelming ability to shock. Nothing in it is quite what you expect. You anticipate harmonic extremism, but its brutality derives from the unremitting garishness of its sonorities rather than from extended dissonance. The real nightmare lies in its monstrosity and in its debt to Mahler. Shostakovich uses a Strauss-sized orchestra including nine horns, six flutes and nine percussionists - a line-up that the Soviet Union of 1936 would inevitably have seen as western and decadent. The Mahlerian legacy is apparent in the protracted funeral marches, the raucously false hurdy-gurdy jollity, the trickling celesta solo which brings the symphony to its close. Mahler is, of course, the chronicler of imperial decline, the describer of the fag end of absolute monarchy, and the symphony's inference - that one form of dreadful autocracy has been replaced by another - could not be more obvious.
Sinaisky stares unblinkingly into its heart of darkness and spares you nothing, while the BBC Philharmonic, on peak form, seems to wrench the guts out of the piece with shattering force. Sinaisky is undoubtedly a great Shostakovich conductor, but he's not happy when it comes to Brahms. The Violin Concerto was the symphony's companion piece, and Sinaisky, unsure whether to stress its classical rigour or its romantic passion, hovers in the middle to muddled effect.
The orchestral playing was less assured too, so the performance became effectively a one-woman show for the soloist, the great Viktoria Mullova. Beautiful as always, she mesmerised with the fierce tenderness of her playing, took expressive risks at every turn, and brought the house down in the process.
