At the USSR Museumokebet, a two hour’s drive from Moscow, visitors can peruse copies of Pravda and Izvestia in a 1960s-style apartment replete with tarpaulin boots and aluminum spoons, part of “a hidden world,” its website says, “of emotional memories and warm nostalgia.” On Thursday, the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Keri-Lynn Wilson turned David Geffen Hall into a different kind of museum of Soviet history. This one was a film designed by the South African artist William Kentridge, with Constructivist puppets cavorting in dollhouse galleries projected over the orchestra’s reading of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10.
Titled “Oh to Believe in Another World,” this dazzling, sly and subversive show is infused with nostalgia for the utopian fervor that fueled the Soviet experiment. It probes the idealism that initially drew in artists like Shostakovich, whose cardboard-costumed avatar bobs and weaves through the film. In animated collages of sinister whimsy, Kentridge presents this particular dance of art and politics as an unrequited love story in which a political ideology devours its most persuasive proponents.
Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony dates from 1953, the year Stalin died, and an air of claustrophobia hangs over its brooding melodies, a mood that breaks only for a storm of violence in the explosive second movement. In her Philharmonic debut, Wilson led a burnished performance that glowed with contained energy, allowing individual wind voices to unfold their emotional power, notably the bassoon in some hauntingly melancholic solos.
Kentridge’s film, which was commissioned by the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, molds itself to each performance with the projectionist reacting to trigger points in the score. But the hyperkinetic animations otherwise pay little attention to the music. Flickering documentary footage is interspersed with animated sculptures and cardboard-masked dancers moving with jerky dreaminess. Collage, a favored form of expression for Kentridge, makes a fine metaphor for history. His Soviet characters are ingenious constructions with photograph faces atop bodies assembled from furniture legs and machine parts; they evoke both the ennobling of industrial labor under the Soviet system and its dehumanizing implementation.
ImageWilson was making her Philharmonic conducting debut in the program, which also included Shostakovich’s “Festival Overture” and Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2.Credit...Chris LeeFor all their ingenuity, though, the visuals rarely connected with the dramatic development of the symphony, as when the frenzied battle music of the second movement was accompanied by an oddly cheerful montage of dancers, gymnasts and artists. Only in one scene did the visuals match the music: When the puppet-Stalin, an avuncular smile fixed on his face, stalks Trotsky with a revolver, their movements mirror the cat-and-mouse counterpoint of Shostakovich’s third movement, in which different sections of the orchestra appear clumsily out of step with one another. While the tragic grandeur of the final movement underscored the poignancy of group photographs with certain faces circled in thick pen, scratched out or obliterated, the music felt reduced to just that — a luxury-cast film score.
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