Symphony No. 9 in E-Flat Major

Shostakovich’s Ninth is unlike anything else in his symphonic canon, so much so that it can completely wrong-foot the first-time listener. It scandalised its first audience, in 1945, who’d been led to expect a Soviet-style successor to Beethoven’s Ninth, a colossal choral celebration of the Soviet Union’s heroic victory in World War II. Instead, Shostakovich’s Ninth is scored for a modest orchestra, lasts under half an hour, and often seems closer to a parody symphony. The first movement is deliciously irreverent: the Russian critic who called it a combination of Haydn and Charlie Chaplin wasn’t wrong. Particularly Chaplinesque is the constant deflation of a self-important trombone by a mocking piccolo. But this is Shostakovich, and as one would expect, nothing is quite straightforward. The melancholic clarinet solo in the second movement touches on deeper things; the initially sparkling scherzo movement (“Presto”) eventually loses its nerve, and the lugubrious bassoon in the fourth (“Largo”) seems poised between parody and something more dangerous. Circus fun and games are restored in the finale (“Allegretto”) but, as in the Fourth Symphony, the circus turns increasingly nightmarish. What no one could see at the time was that the Ninth is also a model of concentration and micro-ingenuity, matching as it does the formal mastery of the 10th Symphony it foreshadows.