Andris Nelsons and the BSO adventured their latest traversals of the Shostakovich oeuvre with Thursday’s pairings of the Sixth and Eleventh symphonies. For this weekend the orchestra  truncated and mixed around its usual schedule, eliminating both Saturday and Tuesday performances and, for an evening rather than a matinee outing on Friday, swapping the Sixth for the first cello concerto. The stated theme of this year’s survey is “Decoding Shostakovich,” which intends to suss out evidence for the composer’s resistance to Stalinist (and Soviet?) tyranny, though if express advocacy for this thesis had been intended in the playing itself, it was hard for these ears to discern.

We were especially eager to hear the Sixth (in B minor, op. 54, 1939), which holds special personal significance as it was the first Shostakovich symphony we heard live, by the New York Phil under Bernstein in, egad, 1963. Not as seldom performed as the Second, Third or Fourth, it’s still one of the less commonly heard, at least in the US. In many ways it presents baffling esthetic conjunctions. Its three movements consist of a massive Largo followed by a short scherzo and even shorter Presto finale, the latter two combined clocking less time than the first. Yet in his statements about the work the composer wanted it known that the overall affect would be “feelings of springtime, joy and youth.” But that Largo! When Shostakovich says calm and cheerful, one should take it rather like Brahms’s describing the second movement of his B-flat piano concerto as “a nice little scherzo.”

Nelsons took a firm, almost austere line with the opening of the first movement, an extended melodic elaboration of two principal motifs, the first based on the minor third interval in a generally rising tune, and the second on a descending diminished seventh trailing into violin trills. He also laid great stress on the contrapuntal development of these ideas, as well he should. We admired, as we often do, Nelsons’s (and of course the orchestra’s) impeccable dynamic control, especially at the level of pianissimo, notably in the trumpets, lending an eerie menace in the quietest possible way; quite cinematic, which is noteworthy in anticipation of the overtly cinematic Eleventh to follow. We also found mesmerizing the scary passages between flute/piccolo and lower strings. Nelsons’s tempo was full-fat largo, and though it did not drag it might have benefited from a bit more flow.

The scherzo sits somewhere in Shostakovich’s esthetic between the blatant irony of the First Symphony and a more genuine, if slightly askew, jollity. It was both quirky and mysterious in its context, and also cinematic (we’ll keep coming back to that word) in its rambunctious outbursts, John Williams avant la lettre. The percussion battery (out in full force, six players!) gave immense satisfaction, as did piccolist (is that a word? If not, it should be) Cynthia Meyers. The raucous, over-the-top finale galumphs on the edge of vulgarity, while Shostakovich gives free rein to one of his signature motifs, the quick two-short-one-long, which never actually quotes the William Tell Overture but makes you think he had (he finally did, in the Fifteenth Symphony, a charming bit of self-satire). Nelsons brilliantly brought out the bright coloration, rapid-fire dynamic shifts, and sometimes tangled cross-rhythms of this whirlwind movement. In its Felliniesque funhouse it was really difficult to take the music at face value, which we guess was the point of the exercise. Under those circumstances, maybe the blaring send-off wasn’t even unhinged enough.

The finesse and expressiveness of the performers was at peak, in both the works they played. The personnel cited above were by no means the only ones deserving particularized praise. In fact, every section and section soloist deserved call-out (which Nelsons duly did) and, instead of our reporting all their names, you can just go read the orchestra roster.

Whatever Shostakovich’s intentions for the Sixth Symphony were, it was dead certain that with the Symphony No. 11 in G minor, op. 103, The Year 1905 (1957) the composer was seeking to produce something “for the masses,” a popular hit; and in this he was completely successful, both with the mass audience and with the apparatchiks who wielded the keys to the dungeon (though things had loosened up a bit after the death of Stalin). In this instance, Shostakovich reached back to events of the year prior to his birth, which were less subject to rigid official party lines than anything at or after 1917. The resultant symphony, a massive hourlong programmatic work comprising four hefty movements played attacca, which some have characterized as a movie score without the movie. The movements are arranged like a sonata da chiesa, slow-fast-slow-fast, and depict first, the Palace Square in St. Petersburg, based on folk and revolutionary tunes rehearsing the abuses of Tsar Nicholas II and the military; second, the events of January 9, 1905 (Julian calendar; January 22, Gregorian), in which peaceful protesters and petitioners were mown down by the Cossacks; third, the lament for the dead; and fourth, a fist-shaking finale threatening (with the benefit of hindsight, of course) retribution against the oppressors. The actual program music, as you can see, ends with the second movement, while the rest is rhetorical. Each movement utilizes found materials, melodically, which Shostakovich expertly molds into proper symphonic form and development. The pre-existing melodies consisted of seven revolutionary songs of the period and two of his own, for an earlier work on the same subject.

The premonitory first movement begins with eerie calm engendered by widely spaced chords in the strings, into which the first melody enters somewhat diffidently. Nelsons evoked the atmosphere of this chilly scene with perfect registration (our thoughts turned to Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky score, but we later saw that Harlow Robinson’s program essay made the same comparison, so we can’t claim any original insight there), and in general Nelsons’s handling of sonorities is impeccable. Nelsons’s take emphasized the stasis of the setting and, as in the Sixth Symphony, while it didn’t drag it could have moved ahead a bit more briskly (at 63 minutes for the whole piece, Nelsons comes in a good 10 minutes slower than, say, Kondrashin). There is a great deal more music in this movement than the introit, of course, much of it agitated, angry and passionate, but:

The second movement is where all the action takes place. The angry music builds, the lines tangle, the melodies (to whose lyricism Nelsons is always attentive) interweave (fugally), Shostakovich presents us with an inverted 1812 Overture, in which the good guys invade and the bad guys beat them down. The cinematography of this movement is paramount, the brass and percussion explode, slimy glissandi in trombones and (this is hard!) tuba do nothing to promote subtlety—the cannons here are perhaps a bit too literal; and then it ends on a dime and fades into violin trills that amazingly sound like human wailing. Blood-pumping stuff.

The dirge-funeral march that follows (the movement is called “Eternal Memory”) is very much not like that in the Eroica symphony. The fallen are depicted as victims, not heroes. The principal tune, which some commenters have suggested evokes part of the Russian Orthodox requiem, enters after a soft pizzicato accompaniment that persists, with Nelsons crafting it carefully, but it’s not a march, more like a limp. The central section keens and builds to a beautiful climax that exalts the human dignity of the fallen. If Shostakovich had ended the symphony here, it would have been esthetically complete, though the fading out of the opening section’s return was exquisite. The finale, called “Tocsin,” is the “et resurrexit” part and, in contrast to the dignified music that precedes it, it’s a bit of a pot-boiler, which we fear Nelsons took a bit too literally. It does, however, feature a brilliant return to the opening movement’s music and a fabulous long solo by Robert Sheena’s English Horn. It gives Shostakovich the big bang ending he wanted for this very public piece, but it leaves open some issues to ponder.

The bit that many think requires “decoding” is which revolution Shostakovich really had in mind for this symphony to describe. In context: 1957 was the year after the Soviets brutally crushed the Hungarian uprising, and some comments the composer made suggest this was on his mind when he wrote The Year 1905, while other comments indicate that it was “only Russian history” he contemplated. These apparently contradictory ideas can, however, be squared. By declaring (pardon the paraphrase) that “I am your retribution,” does the finale actually chastise the all-too-human cycle of revenge and counter-revenge, world without end amen? Is Shostakovich saying, along with Pogo, that “we have met the enemy, and he is us”?

Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens College and New England Conservatory, and law at Harvard. A composer and practicing attorney, he was for many years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.