I'll hit you with a stick and you rejoice

Maestro Jahja Ling returned to the podium of the San Diego Symphony on April 20, 21, and 22 with a concert which was about as cinematic as they come. The program was packaged around Ling and his relationship with the great Leonard Bernstein. Ling was one of Bernstein’s conducting proteges and the concert reflected that relationship.

The program started with music from Bernstein’s On the Town and ended with one of the signature pieces from his conducting career, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. Between these two was a little piece of music known as The Rach 3.

There was an ease of movement in the technique of pianist, Behzod Abduraimov, which made me feel relaxed and confident in his abilities. The 27-year-old Abduraimov took a blistering pace with Rachmaninoff’s monstrous piano part. Yet that was not the defining characteristic of his performance.

Abduraimov performed with oodles of that mysterious quality known as musicality. Musicality can be described in any number of ways but in my opinion it manifests as an acting choice. There are the lines in a play and a great actor speaks them in such a way that it moves the audience to a new or better understanding. In the same way, there are the notes on the page and a musical performance phrases those notes in a way which leads to a greater experience.

It was the musicality of Behzod Abduraimov which delivered the most in this technically brilliant performance. Maestro Ling and the orchestra added their own musical chops to the mix and we, the audience, received a better experience of Rachmaninoff.

Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 was the first thing I heard Jajah Ling conduct way back when he first came to the San Diego Symphony. I recall being impressed with the third movement and this time around, the third time I’ve heard him conduct this piece, was no different.

The symphony is chock-full of the emotions of a man who spent hours smoking outside his home every night so that his family wouldn’t see him dragged away by the KGB. In the fifth symphony, Shostakovich is forced to apologize to the entity which had been terrorizing him and the families of, as it was later revealed, some 20 million other souls.

An atmosphere of despair fills the third movement. It is the spiritual seat of the symphony and the outer movements become propaganda without it. At the premiere there was open weeping during this section of they symphony as the grief of an entire nation was observed. This was 1937 and it was the height of Stalin’s purges.

Maestro Ling pushed the edges of the orchestra’s dynamics about as far as they could go in both directions. The outer movements were on at full throttle while the third movement concluded with a texture so delicate that the sound evaporated into the upper reaches of Symphony Hall.

At the conclusion of the symphony the tempo has traditionally surged forward to the conclusion like a sprinter for the tape. Shostakovich described it as being beaten with a stick and told to rejoice. Ling held the tempo back and even slowed it just a bit, which emphasized the brutal nature of this forced celebration of the Soviet spirit.