F/W 2025: Kazushi Ono
"the brussels philharmonic and I would like to invite you to a musical time machine experience" - discover the Fall/Winter 2025 Season with music director Kazushi Ono
Shostakovich 15
PROGRAMME NOTES
written by JASPER CROONEN
Arvo Pärt Fratres (arr. for winds, strings & percussion) (1977, rev. 2007) (* part of the program on 11.10 at Flagey)
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Dmitri Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1 in C minor, Op. 35 (1933)
Dmitri Shostakovich Symphony No. 15 in A major, Op. 141 (1971)
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11.10.2025 FLAGEY BRUSSELS*
12.10.2025 LUCA CAMPUS LEMMENS LEUVEN
The philosophical music of Pärt and Shostakovich
‘The instant and eternity are struggling within us.’
- Arvo Pärt
What does it sound like to look death in the face? What does it sound like to hear your own end approaching? What does the transience of our existence sound like?
For Arvo Pärt and Dmitri Shostakovich, these were crucial questions. Questions that always preoccupied them, and that would play an increasingly extensive role in their compositions at a later age. What is striking is how both composers each look at these questions of life in a completely different way, with the Fifteenth Symphony by Shostakovich and Fratres by Arvo Pärt serving as models for their diverse visions.
That said, the most important building block for the two gentlemen is the same. Both of them are keen to make use of silence. In fact, according to musicologist Andrew Shenton, not sounding notes is ‘one of the most important compositional techniques in Pärt’s tintinnabuli style, contributing to the sense of stasis and stillness in much of his music. This in turn contributes to the divine quality that is widely admired.’
Shostakovich, for his part, allows the orchestra to come to an almost complete halt, especially in the slow sections of his Fifteenth Symphony. Large pieces of the composition are played in soft dynamics. Yet Dmitri’s silence is never completely silent. His music sounds mostly suppressed, oppressed. Silence serves as a long arc of tension designed to emphasize the great eruptions. Although the last word of this work is again whispered. After the final cadences, the percussion returns, in a soothing pianissimo. This allows the composer to focus your ear on what was missing all along, and is now about to finally disappear.
There are also striking percussive parallels between the two works. The clear tok-tok of the wood block runs like an irregular heartbeat through both the Fifteenth Symphony and the version of Fratres for horns, strings and percussion that we are performing in October. And there is the role of the bells. Literally, in Shostakovich. Here, the tinkle of the glockenspiel opens the work in the allegretto, and the striking shrill sound returns at the end in the special coda of the piece. In Pärt, the bells are symbolic but equally essential. After all, his tintinnabula, which I mentioned earlier, comes from the Latin word for little bell. With his broken chords, which have become Pärt’s instantly recognizable signature, the composer aims to imitate the tinkling sound.
The court jester and the saint
Despite these many overlaps, the two works could hardly be further apart. This is obviously because of the different paths they took.
Shostakovich spent a lifetime struggling with the state apparatus of the Soviet Union. As a creative, he was kept in check, and had to go bowing and scraping to the party leadership several times. By the time he began to write the Fifteenth Symphony, however, he was undeniably one of the most important composers in the Eastern Bloc, if not worldwide. That gave him a more stable, safer position in the communist state. In addition, the composer was already seriously ill. He survived a first heart attack in 1966, and a second followed shortly after the premiere of this symphony. His declining health undoubtedly played a role in the more openly critical sound he puts into his last works.
Shostakovich wrote more daring music in his final compositions. He subtly integrated the innovative ideas of the twelve-tone technique into his pieces. Compositions were never completely dodecaphonic, but Shostakovich did use sequences in his last opus numbers. The end of tonality as a symbol of his own departure.
Shostakovich’s retrospective on his own life therefore sounds somewhat bitter. Playful and high-spirited, but always with an ironic undertone. The opening part especially sounds carnivalesque at times. Full of bombastic brass players trying to give the music inflated grandeur. As if he finally dares to expose the farce in which he has been operating all this time.
Furthermore, his Fifteenth Symphony is peppered with quotes: part of the Radetzky March, a few bars of Mikhail Glinka, a fragment from Götterdämmerung and the many references to his own works... The composer never spoke about his musical inspiration, but it very much seems as if Shostakovich is looking over his shoulder one last time at the composers who formed him, and at the career he has built.
However, that remains a matter of speculation. After all, the composer also applied the same technique in the First Piano Concerto, a work he wrote more than forty years earlier. Here, hidden among Shostakovich’s notes, are Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata, his Third Piano Concerto, Haydn’s Piano Sonata in D Major, references to his own earlier music and even the Viennese folk song O du Lieber Augustin – better known in Belgium as the Sinterklaas or Santa Clause tune. Brass instruments form the second link between the two works by Shostakovich. As in the Fifteenth Symphony, they are assigned an extensive role in the concerto. To the extent that the trumpet is often seen as a fully-fledged solo instrument.
If Shostakovich’s gaze is contemplative and somewhat sardonic, Pärt shows a completely different side of the story. He, too, struggled with the Soviet apparatchiks until the 1980s, but found the answer in a completely different place: in the Orthodox Christian faith. Since his conversion in 1972, Pärt’s deep devotion has been one of the cornerstones of his writing. ‘Religion influences everything,’ says the composer on this subject. ‘Not just music, everything.’
Pärt’s language is therefore much more subdued in tone. His compositions are often based on Gregorian chant or liturgical texts, which creates a religious, spiritual atmosphere in his music. Especially in a work like Fratres, which Pärt wrote shortly after his conversion, in 1977, his golden year, his philosophy of life is still decisive. It cannot be claimed that Fratres is a literal contemplation of death, if only because Pärt composed the work at a much younger age than Shostakovich. But questions about the transient and the eternal are obviously just as fundamental to Pärt. Performed together in one evening, these different visions sound like heavenly complements.
