April 16, 2023

Penultimate PSO concert of the season: Beethoven's first piano concerto and Shostakovich's tenth symphony, two VERY different pieces that were both wonderful. The Beethoven concerto, written when he was quite young, was exquisite. The guest soloist, Kirill Gerstein, had a feather-light touch, and even the largo second movement had an underlying carefree breeziness to it, as if to say even somber moods will soon pass (and the final movement bore that assertion out joyously). The Shostakovich symphony, by contrast, was just overwhelming. Written in the months after Stalin's death, its first two movements felt like an exorcism, and the despairing mood it slides into in the third and much of the final movement seemed to be working through the trauma of those brutal decades. Bursting out of that despair, the piece's final crescendo was at the same time exhilarating -- the sheer virtuosity of the ensemble playing was breathtaking -- and profoundly unsettling, a sort of assertion of individual will in the face of everything that came before it, like an emphatic iteration of Samuel Beckett's "I can't go on, I'll go on." Taken as a whole, the piece was one of those experiences that cleanses you, and leaves your spirit feeling in alignment. I normally listen to music in the car on the way home, but today I turned off the stereo to be with my emotions.