★☆☆☆☆

When Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said this week that he listened to Shostakovich if he was having a hard time, I wondered if he’d been tuned in to the same set as me. There are many things in life that make me reach for Shostakovich and I am rarely let down by performance — certainly never as exasperated as I was by these.

The good things first. The Oslo Philharmonic is a first-rate orchestra with brilliant woodwind soloists and a cracking work ethic. The Norwegian recording engineers are pretty good, too, and the digital editors have cleaned up any hint of audience intrusion in these live 2023 concerts.

I have seldom heard a performance of the fifth symphony of 1937 so riddled with ebbs and flows

The problem is the man with the baton who has nothing to add to the sum of human experience in these life-altering symphonies, written in the thick of Stalin’s Great Terror. The conductor in charge is Klaus Mäkelä and he’s presently the world’s most wanted. Aged 28, a Finn, he is music director in Oslo and Paris, and about to inherit the earth in Amsterdam and Chicago. Talented? No question. Suited to these symphonies? Not by a million light-years.

I have seldom heard a performance of the fifth symphony of 1937 so riddled with ebbs and flows, so void of penetration. Clearly, the conductor has read the score but he cannot have read much around it, let alone digested the information. There are important shades of meaning at almost every juncture in this symphony, complicated by the composer’s propensity for ironic contradiction and in-jokes. None of these elements is audible here and fewer still in the other two symphonies. 

The late Bernard Haitink, who left some shattering Shostakovich recordings, used to say a conductor did not need to know too much about the composer’s life and traumas: it was all in the score. That’s a legitimate point of view, but if a conductor does not bring fresh insight the whole exercise is pointless. Insight comes from profound reflection and life-experience. Klaus Mäkelä, at 28, offers little in Shostakovich beyond an energetic superficiality. Second time around I had to force myself to listen. 

I hope the prime minister is better served. I am advising Sir Keir’s people he should go to one of the Petrenko Liverpool recordings next time he needs a proper Shostakovich cleansing. That’s true grit, and he won’t forget it in a hurry.