Perhaps more than any other composer, Dmitri Shostakovich’s music is a window onto his life and times. His Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93, completed in 1953, is generally seen as his response to the death of Joseph Stalin months earlier. Shostakovich said in his memoir, Testimony (1979), that it was about Stalin, though he had been working on it prior to Stalin’s death.

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s programming of this symphony might be seen as a comment on the tumult in current world affairs and the drift towards oppressive autocracy. Their 2025 program would have been finalised last year and the inclusion of the Shostakovich was presumably intended to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death in 1975; it was a prescient as well as a fitting choice.

The long, tragic, moderato movement, perhaps an expression of the composer’s private emotions, transports the audience into a state of contemplative mourning for those who suffer helplessly under oppression. The reflective voice of the clarinet haunts this movement and clarinet principal Dean Newcomb performed to heartbreaking effect. One can’t help but be reminded of the day in which Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich Shukov lays bricks in the Siberian cold. The first movement ends with a gentle piccolo passage, the piccolo seemingly representative of the composer himself.

Because of its militaristic flavour, listeners might interpret the brief, agitated, allegro second movement as a reference to Stalin, with its use of the snare drum, cascading fast fortissimo passages and explosive dynamics. One can even visualise soldiers scurrying about or people running away from them while shells explode, a characterisation of violent conflict that Shostakovich developed more fully in his eleventh symphony.

The third allegretto movement seems more candidly autobiographical. It begins with a slow, quiet, dance-like passage, and Shostakovich’s signature DSCH motif recurs frequently, together with a repeated horn motif that spells out ‘Elmira’, the name of a student with whom he was said to be infatuated.

As with the first movement, the third is episodic, suggesting short, poetic stanzas, or perhaps in this movement unanswered love letters. The seductively intertwining solos for wind instruments are later supplanted by a brief, militaristic crescendo before a return of the horn motif, accompanied by tiptoeing basses and timpani. The last repetition of the horn’s Elmira theme is followed by the quiet piccolo beggingly repeating the DSCH theme three times to close the movement.

The final andante-allegro movement opens with a deeply felt oboe soliloquy and then downcast bassoon and piccolo passages, as if mourners are in conversation, and the despondent mood of the first movement returns. Optimism reemerges, and the music becomes celebratory, though not without irony and rumination. The DSCH motif even appears as the climax of a militaristic passage, as if the composer had won a victory, and the finale seems mockingly triumphant.

This symphony’s solos in the winds and brass suggest speaking voices, and the ASO’s players were outstanding, particularly oboist Joahua Oates, bassoonist Mark Gaydon, flautist Kim Falconer, and piccoloist Julia Grenfell, as well as clarinettist Newcomb.

This thoughtful and aptly titled ASO program was refreshingly all twentieth-century music, and it featured the acclaimed Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks. The concert began with her Three Gymnopédies for oboe, celeste, harp, and string orchestra of 1953, a delightful and thoroughly engaging work with a pastoral feel and darker shades, making for a complex, emotional landscape. Composed in the same year as the Shostakovich symphony, it offers an alternative and happier vision of life.

The lento tranquillo first movement opens with a short, brooding contrabass passage which is succeeded by a mellifluous oboe statement. Glanville-Hicks’s Three Gymnopédies were inspired by an ancient Greek cultural festival, so listeners might imagine an idyllic garden setting, and the dreamy, impressionistic second movement opens with a celeste ostinato suggesting twinkling sunlight.

The second work on the program proved to be a highlight and featured a captivating performance by visiting violinist Clara-Jumi Kang in Benjamin Britten’s demanding Concerto for Violin No. 1, Op. 15.

Written on the eve of war, the first movement opens with tympani and cymbals, passages for strings and bassoon, and then an airy violin introductory statement that suggests quiet lamentation. A snare drum is heard, a bassoon ostinato develops, and then the pace and dynamics become more assertive. A series of violin gestures with left-hand pizzicati emerge and the first movement ends with a disturbing cry from the violin.

The second, vivace movement opens brightly and the violin passage is stark, edgy, and dramatic. The movement builds to a crescendo with high-pitched notes in strings and winds and the intensity culminates in the febrile cadenza, an anxious declamation that makes use of left-hand pizzicati and harmonics.

The cadenza segues into the third and longest movement, marked ‘Passacaglia: Andante lento (Un poco meno mosso)’. This movement is darker in mood, with the violin and orchestra conversing, and the concerto ends in a more tranquil but still edgy mood. Throughout, the music shifts between lyricism and unsettledness.

Britten’s emotionally complex and technically challenging concerto is an absorbing piece of music and Kang held the audience spellbound. At the conclusion, she was called back to the stage repeatedly to receive the audience’s voluble and well-deserved acclamation. The ASO under conductor Mark Wigglesworth was outstanding throughout this memorable concert.

Shadows (Adelaide Symphony Orchestra) was performed at the Adelaide Town Hall on 12 September 2025.