THE TIMES OF LONDON
January 31, 2003

LPO/MASUR
by John Allison

Even by the standards of serious programming, this latest concert from the London Philharmonic Orchestra was unusually sombre. Shostakovich's rarely performed Thirteenth Symphony, Babi Yar, felt especially apt in the week of Holocaust Memorial Day, but the work's name is derived only from its first movement: the five Yevgeny Yevtushenko poems on which the whole symphony is based range widely in their bleak assessment of mankind's inhumanity.

Yevtushenko's reflections on the atrocity at Babi Yar in Ukraine are more than a condemnation of Nazism. They are also an attack on Russian anti-Semitism and an indictment of racism everywhere. It was a characteristically brave Shostakovich who seized on them a year after their publication in 1961, heading straight into conflict with the Soviet authorities.

The sinister opening was laid unambiguously bare by Kurt Masur and his LPO. Fierce orchestral playing soon took hold in a score that conceals meaningful tunes within its fabric, and the grotesque high jinks of the second movement (Humour) sounded especially hollow. The men of the London Philharmonic Choir were well drilled.

But the performance was made by the presence of the baritone Sergey Leiferkus, whose focused, forward projection brought out the sardonic tone of the music. His declamation of the high-lying lines in that second movement, where the words need to be spat out, was perfectly riveting.

One of Shostakovich's most powerful works, this symphony is a catalogue of gloom if not doom. It gets grimmer with its look at the daily grind of Soviet life in the settings of In the Store, Fears and A Career, the final movement in which there is a strange clearing of the air. This is another of the composer's enigmatic symphonic endings and Masur shaped it unerringly.

In this context, the companion piece, Schubert's autumnal Eighth Symphony, could hardly not have sounded more melancholy than usual. It grew seemingly out of nowhere at the hushed beginning, and the cellos supplied some wonderfully tender playing when they took hold of the rich melodic ideas. There is a very fine line between the "right" speed here and something too slow, and perhaps Masur edged across it: sometimes the music appeared more deliberate than dreamy.

Yet "dreamy" was the right word for the second movement, where the melting clarinet solo sounded unmistakably lonely. Some other woodwind playing was less remarkable, but overall this was a performance of quiet eloquence.