NCH, Dublin

Shostakovich – Symphony No 9

Mahler – Symphony No 4

Shostakovich’s Eighth and Ninth Symphonies got the composer into trouble in the Soviet cultural clampdown of 1948. The wartime Eighth, it seems, needed to have been more optimistic, the post-war Ninth more celebratory. Shostakovich and other eminent colleagues had fallen prey to “formalistic distortions and anti-democratic tendencies in music that are alien to the Soviet people and its artistic tastes”.

The Ninth is actually a very upbeat work (“a transparent, pellucid, and bright mood predominates,” was how the composer put it), but the manner is cartoonish, the often classical surfaces undercut with grotesquerie.

Nowadays, given the complexity of the discussion surrounding Shostakovich’s relationship with the Soviet authorities, room has even been found for the work’s character to be seen as the celebration of a hollow victory.

There were, happily, no extra-musical issues suggested by Saturday’s NCH performance from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Mariss Jansons. The music-making was focused and clear-sighted, gravity and levity were kept in a fine balance, Shostakovich – who had tried and failed to write a genuine “Victory” Symphony – allowed to be heard in persuasively unburdened mode.

There was a similar, intensely rewarding, interpretative neutrality in the approach to Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, the gentle springiness of the rubato was a constant delight, and Swedish soprano Miah Persson’s unaffected clarity gorgeously sustaining the childlike Elysian vision of the finale.