This month, the BSO is celebrating the release of its 19-disc Shostakovich box from Deutsche Grammophon [see our feature HERE] with a “Decoding Shostakovich” slate of talks and performances. The series kicked off Wednesday at the BYSO Youth Center for Music with String Quartet No. 8. Thursday, Andris Nelsons and the BSO revisited Symphonies Nos. 6 and 11. Symphony Hall was not sold out, as it will be for tonight’s concert (Friday April 11^th) featuring Yo-Yo Ma, but it was well filled, and there’s nothing like live Shostakovich, particularly in Nelsons’s thoughtful, exhilarating interpretations. So much for April being the cruelest month.

The Sixth and the Eleventh are not among Shostakovich’s most celebrated works. Neither adheres to conventional sonata form at any point. The Sixth, which premiered in 1939, doesn’t even offer a conventional layout: an extended Largo, a short Allegro, a short Presto. At roughly a half-hour, the piece cuts a modest swath between the 50-minute Fifth and the 75-minute Seventh — rather like Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony between his Third and his Fifth. Shostakovich’s Eleventh, from 1957, bears the title The Year 1905. Incorporating the melodies of 19^th-century protest songs, this symphony purports to commemorate the Russian Revolution of 1905, in which disgruntled peasants, factory workers, soldiers, sailors, and intellectuals compelled Tsar Nicholas II to accept a degree of reform. The popular description of the work as “a film score without a film” is not a compliment.

Both symphonies are underrated. The Sixth at least got off to a good start here: Serge Koussevitzky gave the Boston premiere in March 1942, and over the next three years the BSO played this work on a remarkable 26 programs. Then it didn’t reappear until 1983. Since 1944, the BSO has programmed the Sixth just a dozen times, most recently with Nelsons in 2017. The Eleventh likewise had its most recent BSO outing in 2017, but that was, yes, its first ever BSO outing, six performances under Nelsons. I seem not to have realized when I reviewed the September 28^th, 2017 concert for the Intelligencer [HERE] that I was attending the symphony’s Boston premiere, 60 years after its world premiere in Moscow.     

The Sixth must have disappointed Soviet critics expecting a heroic follow-up to 1937’s outwardly Party-positive four-movement Fifth. It’s as if Shostakovich were saying, let’s dispense with the fake-optimistic opener and go straight to the funeral march. Running close to 20 minutes, the Largo is a sonata form with no development and a very brief recapitulation. The opening four-note motif hangs in the air, yearning and warning; the second subject is barely more than a rhythm snatched from the timpani. Violent climaxes make way for solo winds to swap grievances. Lasting about six and a half minutes each, the Allegro and the Presto are high-spirited romps with rollicking winds, the Allegro scherzo-like, the Presto a dizzy rondo gallop with interludes including a parody of/tribute to Mozart’s Symphony No. 40. Like the Largo, they’re sonata form with no development and various degrees of recapitulation. The Allegro evaporates into the air; the Presto, as so often with Shostakovich finales, finds refuge in the music hall, the silent-film cinema, the circus.    

Nelsons’s reading didn’t depart much from the 2017 performance that was recorded for the box. The Largo might have gone a smidge faster than it did in 2017, but time felt suspended all the same. The cellos led a warm, surging statement of that opening four-note motif, and as he would do throughout the evening, Nelsons pointed up each new event, whether the violins’ threnody on a seven-note motif or Cynthia Meyers’s glittering piccolo solo or Lorna McGhee’s lilting flute or Robert Sheena’s insinuating cor anglais. The climaxes unfurled with a sense of inevitability; after an annunciatory tam-tam stroke, a flute duet (McGhee and Linda Toote) seemed inspired by the nightingale warbling of Mahler’s late symphonies, and when McGhee returned solo, she sounded preternatural, Nelsons simply standing and listening, as if in admiration. The reprise of the A section, now moving perceptibly faster, brought ominous rippling triplets from Andrew Sandwick’s bass clarinet; the recapitulation of the B section from Josh Baker’s bassoon lasted just seconds, and then Jessica Zhou’s harp and Timothy Genis’s timpani concluded with descending fourths that echoed the parodic funeral march of Mahler’s First Symphony, as if to say this movement has solved nothing.

Nelsons’s Allegro was sharp-edged but not too fast and not at all clotted, giving you room to register the cymbal crashes and prominent xylophone, Thomas Martin’s E-flat clarinet soaring into the stratosphere, more frolicking from Meyers and McGhee, the horns with a cheerful film-music theme, a timpani solo from Genis, a mirror-image duet for McGhee and Sandwick, and finally a brief horn chorale before the concluding pppp wind skitter sent the movement sailing up and away like an escaping balloon. The Presto was pure kinetic energy, horns and trumpets singing out, the cymbals initiating another free-spirited climax, leisurely solos for Baker and McGhee leading to one for concertmaster Nathan Cole, who then unobtrusively segued back into the galloping first section. Everyone reveled in the raucous finale, trombones and tuba coming to the fore, the composer serving up his personal concept of socialist utopia.   

Shostakovich originally planned Symphony No. 11 for the 50^th anniversary of the 1905 Revolution, but his wife’s death, his mother’s death, and his own remarriage kept him from finishing it on time, so it wound up as a 40^th-anniversary tribute to the 1917 Revolution. It premiered in Moscow in 1957 and was sufficiently well received by Nikita Khrushchev’s post-Stalin Soviet government that the composer, who had been denounced for formalism in 1948, received the Lenin Prize in 1958.

The Eleventh runs a bit over an hour in four continuous movements titled “Palace Square,” “The Ninth of January,” “Eternal Memory,” and “Tocsin.” The first two titles refer to the “Bloody Sunday” that jump-started the 1905 Revolution. Already by January 8 of that year, St. Petersburg was without electricity and newspaper distribution. On Sunday January 9, workers processed to the square of the Winter Palace to present Tsar Nicholas II with a petition. The troops guarding the palace fired on the demonstrators; some 200 were killed and as many as 1000 wounded. According to Shostakovich’s son, Maxim, the composer’s father, Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich, was among the petitioners who escaped.

Eschewing sonata form, Shostakovich weaves his symphony from a succession of songs without words. The revolutionary folk protests include “Listen” (“Like an act of betrayal, like the conscience of a tyrant, the autumn night is black”), “The Convict,” “Funeral March of the Workers,” “Hail, Free Word of Liberty,” the Ukrainian “Rage, Tyrants,” and the Polish “Warszawianka” (“Enemy whirlwinds surround us”). From time to time, Shostakovich quotes the “Große Appell” trumpet motif from Mahler’s “Resurrection” Second Symphony. Mostly, though, he quotes himself, borrowing two themes from his “Ninth of January,” the sixth of his 1951 Ten Poems on Texts by Revolutionary Poets of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. This pair first appear in the second movement, his settings of “O Tsar, our little father” and “Bare your heads! On this doleful day the trembling shadow of a long night fell over the Earth.” They recur throughout the rest of the symphony.

You don’t actually need the song lyrics to follow the argument, and the movement titles confine to a time and place a symphony whose music celebrates the people rather than the Party and denounces tyranny in all forms. By 1957, Soviet troops had crushed the Hungarian Uprising. The massacre that Shostakovich depicts in the second movement is as relevant to Budapest 1956 as it is to St. Petersburg 1905.

Nelsons gave us a more compact “Palace Square” Thursday than he did in 2017, but the movement still felt edgy and expectant, as if what happened then might happen now. As with the Sixth, he created air around entrances and solos: Genis’s ghostly timpani triplets, which infiltrate the entire symphony; Thomas Rolfs’s trumpet and then Richard Sebring’s horn holding out the hope of resurrection over martial snare drum; McGhee and Toote introducing “Listen”; Richard Svoboda’s bassoon alluding unmistakably to the bassoon’s opening motif in the Andante elegiaco of Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony. “The Convict” emerged powerfully from the cellos and basses, weary and trudging, before being taken up by McGhee’s flute and Martin’s clarinet. (Shostakovich’s paternal grandfather was a convict, having been exiled to Siberia in the wake of a failed attempt on Tsar Alexander II.) Svoboda and contrabassoonist Samuel Watson proposed “Listen” once more, but Tsar Nicholas II was not listening; he was not in St. Petersburg on January 9, 1905. The concluding trumpet resurrection call asked a question with no answer.

“O Tsar, our little father” and “Bare your heads!” dominate “The Ninth of January” and return in “Eternal Memory” and “Tocsin.” Over the ever-present timpani triplets, “O Tsar” was insistent at first, then pleading in the violins before building to a whirlwind climax; “Bare your heads!,” as a brass chorale led by the trumpets, became more and more of an accusation. After the climax subsided, the trumpets asked the resurrection question once again and then snare drum initiated the fugue that leads to a massacre propelled by snare drum, bass drum, timpani, tam-tam, and cymbals, Nelsons taking the composer’s Allegro marking to heart without sacrificing clarity and building to the orchestra’s scream of “Bare your heads!” That was answered by an Adagio hush framing Vytas Baksys’s tenderly weighted celesta, more trumpet resurrection calls, once last plea to “Listen” from McGhee and Toote, and twinkling from Baksys and Zhou before those timpani triplets enforced silence.

I like “Eternal Memory” at Oleg Caetani’s metronome mark of 56, but Nelsons, at pretty much the Adagio = 72 that Shostakovich asks for, achieved its own gravity, the violas unsentimental in the opening “Funeral March of the Workers,” the horns intoning “Hail, Free Word of Liberty” over black trombones and tuba, the violins almost shy in that theme and then another film-score-like climax developing, the timpani triplets returning and the orchestra screaming out “Bare your heads!” once again. Then the violas took up “Funeral March of the Workers” exactly as before, nothing having changed.

With its syncopated gallop, “Tocsin” is one of those Shostakovich finales that seems to be running from the police. Actually, as “Rage, Tyrants,” “Warszawianka,” “O Tsar,” and “Bare your heads!” pile atop one another, it becomes clear that the composer is calling for everyone to converge on Palace Square. Nelsons led a crisp, lucid charge, with “Rage, Tyrants” slowed to half speed and showing the way. Eventually the orchestra settled on “O Tsar” repeated over and over before a tam-tam stroke and an allusion to the timpani motto from Mahler’s Sixth Symphony cleared a path for one of Shostakovich’s finest inspirations, a solo meditation on “Bare your heads!” to which Sheena did full justice, underlining that magical moment when this G-minor symphony gets a glimpse of B-flat major. “O Tsar” returned in the bass clarinet, Nelsons giving Sandwick ample room; the horns took up “Bare your heads!,” and church bells rang out, perhaps not warning so much as announcing and celebrating the coming of 1906 — the year Dmitri Dmitrievich was born.

That’s what we should have heard Thursday, but the chimes hardly registered. On the 2017 recording, they’re audible if a bit high and thin for the church bells that Shostakovich surely had in mind. I also love the way, in some performances, the bells continue to resound after the orchestra has stopped. That is, unfortunately, not what Shostakovich wrote. In the score, everyone finishes on a unison quaver G. Yevgeny Mravinsky, who conducted the premiere, did the final bar the way Shostakovich wrote it; so does Nelsons.                  

Postscript: The rest of the BSO’s season, all of it under Nelsons, is mix and match. Ma is playing Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto on a bill with Symphony No. 11 tonight (April 11). April 17 through 19 will bring Mitsuko Uchida in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, on a bill with yet another underrated Shostakovich symphony, No. 15. The Sixth will return alongside Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms April 26 and 27. The season will conclude May 2–3 with Baiba Skride in Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto and then Symphony No. 8.     

Then there’s the discussion and chamber-music series. “Music Diplomacy and U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchanges,” April 15 at the ASEAN Auditorium of Tufts University’s Fletcher School, features a panel and solo violin pieces played by Victor Romanul. “Shostakovich in Soviet Cinema,” April 23 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, will screen Grigori Kosintsev’s 1964 film Hamlet, for which Shostakovich wrote the score. “Judaism in the Soviet Union,” April 30 at the Vina Shul, will offer a discussion and performance of the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry. And “Form and Function: The Legacy of Brutalism,” May 7 in the lobby of Boston City Hall, will have Wentworth Institute of Technology professor Mark Pasnik, who co-wrote Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston, plus pianist Jonathan Senik in the Opus 34 set of 24 Preludes.

Finally, the Shostakovich box. It includes all 15 symphonies, both piano concertos (Yuja Wang), both violin concertos (Skride), both cello concertos (Ma), the Chamber Symphony, the incidental music for King Lear and a suite from the Hamlet score, and the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The Second and Third Symphonies share a disc, as do the Fifth and Sixth, and the Ninth and Tenth. Every other symphony has its own disc. Each duo of concertos — piano, violin, and cello — has its own disc; Lady Macbeth takes up the final three. In other words, the layout is ideal. You might already have acquired some of the symphony discs, which have been available for a while now, and the cello- and piano-concerto discs will be released on their own within the next month. On the other hand, at the moment neither the violin concertos nor the very fine Lady Macbeth is slated for release on disc. So the shelf-saving box, at the Symphony Hall price of $99, is hard to resist. I didn’t, nor did Brian Bell. His feature is HERE.

Jeffrey Gantz has been writing about music, dance, theater, art, film, and books for the past 45 years, first for the Boston Phoenix and currently for the Boston Globe.