Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra finished the 2024–2025 season with two of Shostakovich’s greatest works, Violin Concerto No. 1 and Symphony No. 8. It might have seemed an odd program for May, since these are also two of Shostakovich’s grimmest works. On a warm Friday afternoon, however, Symphony Hall was reasonably full for a pair of terrific performances—the concerto with Latvian soloist Baiba Skride—not very different from the ones in the 19-disc BSO/Nelsons Shostakovich box that Deutsche Grammophon has just released.

Both the symphony and the concerto date from the 1940s. Shostakovich composed the Eighth in 1943, just a year after the “Leningrad” Seventh; Yevgeny Mravinsky and the USSR Symphony Orchestra gave the premiere on November 4, 1943, to tepid reviews. The First Violin Concerto was completed in 1948, but by that time Shostakovich was again under fire and the Eighth was in limbo. He put the concerto in a desk drawer and didn’t bring it out again till after Stalin’s death; the dedicatee, David Oistrakh, gave the premiere with Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic on October 29, 1955. The heart of each piece is a passacaglia movement where the variations are of an unusual length, 17 bars for the concerto, nine for the symphony.       

Oistrakh’s three recordings run around 36 minutes. Most violinists are a bit more leisurely, but the 43 minutes of Skride’s 2022 presentation with Nelsons and the BSO (preserved in the box set) is in a different time zone. On Friday, Skride and Nelsons again made good on their expansive approach. A nightwalker in no particular hurry, she turned the opening Nocturne (which eschews sonata form) into a hypnotic after-dark meditation and ramble, pausing to exchange poignant condolences with bassoonist Josh Baker, soaring without screeching, then easing into the Poco meno mosso second section. That too became agitated, and after a soft piccolo scream from Cynthia Meyers (taking up Skride’s anguished high B flat), she started over, her tone glinting light and dark, celesta and harp twinkling like stars, the lower elements of the orchestra prowling, the tam-tam suggesting she might be passing a graveyard. She started up a third time, double-stopping over a second ominous tam-tam stroke, before harp chords announced the coming dawn and she finished on a high E, a lark ascending out of sight.

The Scherzo was high-spirited to start, two flutes and Andrew Sandwick’s bass clarinet gamboling with Skride. She reconnected with Baker; the composer’s first ever use of his DSCH musical acronym sang out in the winds, and Skride took it up before lurching into the 2/4 klezmer second subject, whose circus climax would hardly have pleased Soviet music critics in 1948. Skride danced, and then the development saw the initial theme passed from one orchestra section to another every 10 seconds. The full orchestra bursting in with the recapitulation was a surprise, and so was the sudden reappearance of the 2/4 klezmer music in concert with the DSCH motif, Shostakovich making his Jewish sympathies plain. The orchestra shifted back into 3/8 for the B-flat-major finish, but Skride kept to 2/4 till the last two bars, as if in protest.

The Passacaglia is Shostakovich at his most heart-rending. The four-note ground theme starts out in the cellos and basses, underneath a funereal fanfare from the French horns; then bassoon and tuba have the theme underneath a noble wind chorale. Positioned almost center-stage in the absence of trumpets and trombones, Mike Roylance’s tuba had welcome extra weight. Skride offered a magically simple rendition of the solo violin’s melody in No. 3; she and Robert Sheena were equally magical in No. 4, where English horn takes up the melody while solo violin riffs; and then the process was repeated in #5 with the entrance of Michael Winter’s solo French horn. Solo violin gets the theme in No. 7, Skride making it sound like a question rather than the usual accusation; in #8 she played the melody of No. 3 in a lower register over a clarinet chorale and the theme back in bassoon and tuba. Daniel Bauch’s spectral timpani underlaid No. 9, after which Skride rose over a soft timpani roll, paused to let the end of the Passacaglia hang in the air, and then plunged into another Shostakovich surprise, a cadenza that revisits the concerto’s themes, including the DSCH motif and the Scherzo’s klezmer music, in an orgy of double-, triple-, and quadruple-stopping. The five minutes she took was about average, but her fluid, organic interpretation combined virtuosity with clarity.

A closing movement titled Burlesque does not comport with mid-20^th-century Soviet notions of serious and uplifting, particularly when the winds’ opening salvo is underscored by xylophone, which on Friday did full justice to Shostakovich’s ff marking. Skride played an extended game of tag with William Hudgins’s clarinet before breaking into a rustic dance. The ensuing zany rondo brought honking French horns and a parody of the Passacaglia theme, here played by solo French horn against two clarinets and the xylophone. As was the case in 2022, Skride and Nelsons were a touch slower in this movement than most performers are; the effect was jovially satiric rather than demonic.

In deference, I imagine, to the length of the program (some 110 minutes of music), Skride did not offer an encore. Her 2022 First Concerto and her similarly excellent 2023 Second take up a single disc in the BSO’s Shostakovich box. But whereas Deutsche Grammophon is releasing both the two piano concertos (with Yuja Wang) and the two cello concertos (with Yo-Yo Ma) as single CDs, if you want to hear the two violin concertos, you have to buy the box or settle for a digital download. I appreciate that Wang and Ma have more commercial drawing power than Skride, but the implication that her performances aren’t the equal of theirs seems to me unfortunate. She brings an expansive approach to the music that you won’t find elsewhere. (Frank Peter Zimmermann’s recording of the pair runs almost 20 minutes shorter than Skride’s.) In the First Concerto’s Nocturne, she and Nelsons take two minutes longer than anyone else, but the result never drags. It’s an interpretation that moves in its own time and goes its own way.                  

One might well wonder why Shostakovich didn’t pull out the desk drawer for the Eighth Symphony five years before he deposited the violin concerto there. The 1942 “Leningrad” had purported to honor that city’s heroic resistance to the Nazi blockade. By late 1943, the Soviet Union had defeated the German army at Stalingrad and was close to ending the siege of Leningrad, so the audience that heard the Eighth’s November premiere might have expected a celebration. At some 25 minutes, the opening Adagio is as long as the Seventh’s opening Allegretto, but here the dissonant climax points to the real enemy as not Hitler but Stalin. Shostakovich builds the movement, and indeed the entire symphony, out of a three-note motto, as if to say that’s as much material as he was permitted to work with. The second movement Allegretto is all forced cheering; the Allegro non troppo toccata third suggests what happens to those who don’t. The last three of the five movements run together, so that the Largo passacaglia emerges from the toccata as yet another of the composer’s funeral marches. The Allegretto finale is a wake for the mourners, who console one another until that dissonant climax returns like an informer in their midst. After some individual mutterings, the symphony subsides into a stunned silence. It was the first Shostakovich symphony anyone had heard with a downbeat conclusion.       

Nelsons is not unusually slow in this work, but he shapes Shostakovich’s paragraphs with care and gives you time to appreciate how each theme evolves from its predecessor. The opening motto from the cellos and basses bespoke power and resistance; the first violins, when they entered with their lament, seemed to suspect someone sinister might be listening in. Sandwick’s bass clarinet and the three bassoons chimed in like elders who’d seen it all; then the first violins returned for the lyrical 5/4 second subject over mournful chugging from the rest of the strings. The flutes began the development in a nervously low register; Nelsons made a lucid cacophony out of the nightmarish climax; the upper winds (including two piccolos and E-flat clarinet) ran for their lives, and with good reason, since at Nelsons’s moderate tempo the violent march that followed depicted tanks rolling in and over.

Anchored by Timothy Genis’s ferocious timpani, everyone reassembled for the recapitulation, after which the symphony seems at a loss as to how to proceed until the English horn steps up for three minutes of healing. Sheena wove a hypnotic spell that went on even after the second subject should have started, as if no one wanted him to stop. The first violins grew tender; the cellos and basses returned to the opening theme with an unearthly calm. Trumpets and French horns offered a military salute to the fallen, and the final solo trumpet call from Thomas Rolfs provided a glimmer of hope.

So often in Shostakovich, whatever is achieved in his first movement is promptly undone by the second. Here, Nelsons’s second-movement Allegretto began with a version of the motto theme that seemed to have been infiltrated and distorted by Stalin’s secret police. Meyers (piccolo), Richard Svoboda (bassoon), and Samuel Watson (contrabassoon) did a kids-march parody of the police; the police, after a perfunctory development, replied with a full-blast recapitulation including tambourine, the kids countered with snare drum, and Genis banged out the three-note motto as a prelude to the motoric toccata of the Allegro non troppo, the tanks back for good. Nelsons maintained a mind-numbingly steady pace, a wind section headed by Thomas Martin’s E-flat clarinet screaming in vain. An interlude brought a galloping trumpet solo from Rolfs; then the water torture recommenced, over xylophone, snare drum, bass drum, and timpani, bleeding with one last crash on the tam-tam into the passacaglia, the funeral rites starting without notice or official sanction.

Nelsons delivered this fourth movement with a dignified gravity, creating distinct layers over the ground theme in cellos and basses. The orchestra, as if in shock, appears not to register the odd nine-bar variation length; solo piccolo enters two bars late, solo clarinet is a bar early, the violins are all over the shop. Richard Sebring’s mellow French horn seemed to call from another country; Meyers’s otherworldly piccolo and the quartet of fluttertongueing flutes might have emanated from the beyond (though Shostakovich was not a believer). Hudgins’s wisdom-whispering clarinet brought the proceedings back to earth. Even as the strings started up a canon in No.10, the clarinet continued on, its arabesques in No.11 pointing the way toward the exit.

Svoboda’s cheerful bassoon led everyone to the Allegretto wake; the first violins proposed toasts (Shostakovich here conjuring the bittersweet Prokofiev of Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella); Lorna McGhee contributed a peppy flute solo that the cellos graciously acknowledged. The lower winds got rowdy, the trombones began to quack, eventually a spontaneous fugue broke out. Brass and timpani were still celebrating when the nightmare of the first movement rematerialized, Nelsons mesmerizingly deliberate in letting the cataclysm unfold. Bass clarinet (Sandwick), violin (Nathan Cole), and cello (Blaise Déjardin) tried to pick up the pieces; the three bassoons reprised their role as elders who’ve seen it all; the first violins made a half-hearted attempt to recapture the movement’s initial gaiety. The final pages seemed to go on forever, upper strings suspended, cellos offering one last sigh of resignation, basses sounding out the three-note motto, the symphony ending where it started, nothing changed. Or perhaps Shostakovich was saying, “It’s not all bad, I wrote this symphony and didn’t get arrested!”                    

The Eighth was the first Shostakovich work I ever heard live—at the embarrassingly advanced age of 59. That was in 2005, when Paavo Berglund, seated at the podium and scarcely moving his baton, led the BSO in a performance that, as sublime as it was restrained, showed me the composer in a new light. Nelsons—the first BSO music director to champion Shostakovich since Serge Koussevitzky—has taken a similar approach in regaling Boston with what amounts to a decade-long DSCH festival. Dmitri Dmitrievich is absent from the BSO’s 2025–2026 line-up, so the orchestra’s “Decoding Shostakovich” series (which concludes this Wednesday at Boston City Hall) and the Deutsche Grammophon box [featured HERE] mark the end of a mini-era for which I’m grateful.     

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.