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Last week, I attended a performance by the Pacific Symphony. The program consisted of three pieces: Martinu’s Memorial to Lidice, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and Shostakovich’s Symphony no.5. Carl St. Clair, in his pre-performance remarks, specifically associated the more serious pieces with Memorial day as a finale for the holiday week. The concert was illuminating in a number of ways.

The first piece, by Martinu, is hardly as well-known as the other two. A powerful and at times brutal depiction of the results of the Nazi eradication of the eponymous village, the intensity of the music left the audience breathless and the conductor took an extra few moments at the conclusion of the piece before indicating to the audience that it was, in fact, over. All in all, it was a successful performance of a less-known and somewhat difficult piece that connected seamlessly with the audience.

The Rachmaninoff was a different story.

Yuja Wang, who bowed out due to illness, was replaced at the last-minute by the 16-year-old Conrad Tao in his concert debut. The audience took this change in program gracefully and greeted the young Julliard student with warmth and open anticipation. His technique was superb, with a clarity and precision admirable for his youth; however, this precision served to be a double-edged sword. The Rhapsody is a varied and multifaceted piece requiring an approach to the piano incorporating a vast and varied array of tone, touch and technique; this so terrified the late Artur Rubinstein that he dared not play the piece while the composer was still alive. Mr. Tao, while talented and confident, seemed to approach the work with a clipped and percussive style that worked for some passages but not the work as a whole, particularly the slower and more delicate passages requiring a greater contrast and shading. This, combined with his youth and emotional inexperience, had the result of attaching  to the otherwise somber or lyrical sections the lugubrious sentimentality which critics of Rachmaninoff’s music tend to detest.

His encore was Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no.6; a stellar performance of the piece but one rhapsody too many. I am not sure of the wisdom of following a brassy Rachmaninoff piece with a coppery Liszt but the audience loved it and in truth he performed it quite well, his percussive style serving the hammering octave passages. I am convinced that his current style is more suited to the likes of Liszt, Brahms and Prokofiev. Overall it was a good performance for a 16-year-old student but left me lukewarm and wanting to hear him again after he has had time to mature.

The last half of the evening was Shostakovich’s Symphony no.5 and it was a return to the darker tone from the concert’s opening. Carl St. Clair spent a good deal of time on his pre-performance notes, describing a detailed narrative through all four movements; the piece clearly means a lot to him. While I am always happy to hear a performer’s insights on the music I feel that Mr. St. Clair went a bit overboard; a little exposition is fine but I don’t like to have too clear a picture of the music before I actually hear it—particularly if it is a new piece for me. Nevertheless; though I have never been a particular fan of Shostakovich, tonight I may have to revise my opinion. This was a masterpiece plain and simple.

Much has been said on the political importance of Shostakovich’s music. Much has been said, and denied, about his attitudes towards everything and everyone associated with Soviet Russia. Much can be said of his use of melody, harmony and structure in his music. Entire books have been written on these subjects and I have no desire to rehash them here.

I would like to take a different approach.

While much has been made of the plight of Soviet musicians, public opinion seems to waver about Shostakovich’s true beliefs and motivations. Testimony, which claims Shostakovich hated Stalin, Communism, and the entirety of the soviet state, is a highly controversial work whose veracity has been supported and challenged by everyone from soviet officials to the composer’s family. Since this is a subject I have not researched I can only approach it through the music itself. By the end of the performance I knew only one thing; no composer born and raised in a place like America could ever create music like this. No matter how dark the sensibility, or how deep the wellsprings of creativity, the imagination cannot even begin to approach the reality of what life was like for those people, in that place, at that time. The music, carefully crafted as it is, presents a raw and unvarnished spectrum of emotions; anger, bitterness, hope, joy, hatred, despair, and the sort of mocking, sarcastic humor indicative of the clown that laughs with his face while crying in his heart.

Nobody who grew up in a place like America, relatively free and prosperous, can even begin to capture these sorts of emotions with the same level of intensity as a subject of oppression no matter how vivid their internal world. This is the value of Shostakovich’s music. It gives us, a people of comparable freedom and happiness, a small but undeniable taste of what it felt like to live as victims of an oppressive totalitarion regime. I, for one, will never forget it.