Grief-fuelled symphony honours man of sincerity

Arvo Volmer

Tomorrow night Estonian conductor Arvo Volmer debuts with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, celebrating the Shostakovich centenary with the city's first performance of the Russian composer's great Leningrad Symphony.

Volmer came to the notice of the music world when he won the 1989 Nikolai-Malko Competition; since then he has been working in Estonia, Finland and, most recently, Australia, as music director of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

His many CDs range from symphonies by his countryman Eduard Tubin to a glowing account of Ross Edwards' new Oboe Concerto with the vivacious Diana Doherty as soloist, released on Australia's first classical single.

Volmer is quite taken with Australia's "mix of European and British with something that's so completely different".

Of Australian composers, he particularly warms to Edwards: "You can recognise his music immediately," and he is adamant the Adelaide musicians "must play music by people that live with us in the same place and same time. We have to champion Australian music because no one else will do that."

But, in just over 24 hours, across the Tasman, he will be taking the cause of Shostakovich and he admits he is a great fan of the man.

It's the ethical side of the composer that appeals. "Shostakovich felt this need to write something that would make and leave the world a better place. It's something that is seldom to be met these days."

The 1942 Leningrad Symphony is a legendary work, earning its composer a cover portrait on Time magazine, as well as the sarcasm of Bartok, who converted one of its themes into a circus gallop in his Concerto for Orchestra.

Immensely popular in both the east and west, its robust, populist idiom disturbed critics like Olin Downes, who dismissed it as "first-rate propaganda, but a second-rate symphony".

Virgil Thomson was crueller still, lambasting it as "written for the slow-witted, the not very musical and the distracted".

For Volmer the sincerity of the mammoth score is unquestionable, showing Shostakovich's grief at what was going on during World War II, and before.

He believes Shostakovich, who always worked out his compositions in his head and then wrote them out relatively quickly, must have been composing this symphony long before Hitler's siege of Leningrad.

"The process of war brought the symphony more quickly to paper as Shostakovich was horrified with what was happening to his town.

"Above all, it's a human statement, a general stand against any kind of terror or oppression and that's what makes Shostakovich so special for me.

"Everyone knows the first movement, but I particularly like the second and the cornerstone is very much the slow third movement, the requiem to victims of inhumanity."

However, tomorrow night's concert is not all devoted to such weighty issues. The programme opens with Shostakovich's First Piano Concerto of 1933, with American pianist Robert Edward Thies returning to share solo duties with the APO's principal trumpet, Ukrainian Victor Silverstone.

"Here is a piece that belongs to the end of an era; the screws had yet to be tightened," says Volmer.

"The second movement has something of the melancholy of Ravel's G major Concerto, but the concerto as a genre doesn't necessarily have to carry any philosophical agenda.

"But even here, there may well be hidden messages. Some themes are in fact quotations of Russian popular songs, with a funny text that could be seen as a coded message."

He reflects for a few seconds, and perhaps remembering the wacky silent movie music antics of the Finale, laughs quietly. "But somehow I don't think so."

* Who: Conductor Arvo Volmer with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra

* Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, tomorrow 8pm