Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No.13 (1962), subtitled Babi Yar, was an attempt to commemorate the 1941 massacre of 33,000 Jews in a Ukrainian ravine by the Nazis. The cover up of the massacre at Babyn Yar and the denial of antisemitism in Soviet society were taken to task by Yevgeny Yevtushenko in his eponymous poem, a shaming indictment of silence and complicity; Shostakovich would set four more of his poems to music to create an hour-long symphony on other miseries of Soviet life: starvation, repression, denunciation, and so on. Its subject saw the work effectively banned after the premiere in 1962, which the authorities tried to knobble with all kinds of dirty tricks. Despite this it was a triumph, if a rare bird on programmes subsequently. (To date it hasn’t been performed in Vienna).

The Philharmonia Chorus, in which I sing, were given the opportunity to perform it in Lille and the Philharmonie de Paris with the Orchestre National de Lille and its new Music Director Joshua Weilerstein. The programme, partly inspired by Jeremy Eichler’s acclaimed study Time’s Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and The Music of Remembrance, also contained Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, a severe work for reciter, chorus and orchestra, in which Lambert Wilson (of The Matrix: Revolutions fame in the Anglosphere) describes Jews singing the Shema Yisrael as they are driven into the gas chambers.

It ranks among one of the most rewarding artistic projects I’ve ever been a part of as a singer. This is perhaps because of — rather than despite — the weeks of dedication it took for us to learn the necessary Russian and recalibrate our collective vocal apparatus to make a sound that would honour poet and composer. (On no account, our Chorus Master Gavin Carr said, could we sound ‘like an English choir’.)

Shostakovich makes an austere and compelling choice in his choice of vocal forces — a chorus of male basses who sing almost exclusively in unison, fronted by a sepulchral bass soloist, sage and jester by turns (the incomparable Dimitri Belosselskiy). The chorus play a variety of roles — Jew-hating thugs who stink of vodka and onions; an anonymous, terrifying voice of authority in ‘Fears’; in the last movement, jocular lads from some opera buffa; and, after an orchestral climax of shattering force in the opening movement, the imposing trees that, as Yevtushenko says, stand in hieratic judgement at the site of the massacre.

Carr has likened some of the piece’s garishness to the work of Otto Dix and Georg Grosz. It also holds a depth, monochromatic richness, and uncompromising severity redolent of Franz Kline. It shares with Kline, and other abstract artists like Richard Serra, a certain monumental intensity that sums up the feeling of responsibility towards historical remembrance that each performer must embrace.

This is one of the things that made the work intensely draining and moving to perform. As a chorister you are winded by the huge climaxes of the first movement, which batters you with wailing strings and winds and percussion that thunders like artillery. ‘At Babi Yar there stands no monument’, we sing at the outset, in a slow sad trudge. We are called to mourn by tolling bells, which in the Philharmonie were placed high up and far away in the hall. ‘A drop that is as sheer as a crude gravestone. / I am afraid.’ In 2022 a Russian airstrike damaged the monument that was eventually erected there. Making this music might be an attempt to repair it, in part.

The single voice, en masse, is an important homage to Yevtushenko’s standing as an orator-poet who read Babi Yar to stadiums full of people, and captures the social significance of his art. It takes collective outspokenness, thundering with moral authority and righteous anger, to defy collective forgetting — a unitary declaration that captures the severe didacticism of Yevtushenko’s poems. ‘Let “The Internationale” thunder / when the last antisemite on earth is buried’, we roar at the climax. This single, dark vocal line also recalls — in the vein of Rachmaninoff and Mussorgsky — the ancient ritual chant of the Orthodox church, admonishing and prophetic. Only at one moment is there harmony, when in the third movement — ‘In the shop’ — the chorus offers a halo-like prayer for the poor, starving women whose trudge around the empty stores Yevtushenko sets out with dignity and humanity, as castanet and woodblock clatter emptily.

The earthy sound of these low voices reflects the landscape at Babyn Yar, musical and geographical. Our first entry sits low, in shadow. The site of the massacre was built over by the Soviets, and then churned up in a flood, with mud and vegetation, the viscous legacy of its horror; the viscous orchestral tread of the first movement, with low horns and strings, feels held back by thick pools of sludge. Movements three and four both feature narrow, oozing melodies in the lowest strings, lyrically malnourished and circumscribed in their movement. Even its lightest movement, the circus-burlesque of ‘Humour’, is shrouded in ink-black comedy, as the title trickster sticks two fingers up, like Till Eulenspiegel, at death and tyranny.

‘Fears’ — the fourth movement — digs deepest into the earth, an unpitched chasm of tam-tam and bass drum at its heart; the chorus intone a rough chant on a single pitch, as if music hasn’t been invented yet. The bass soloist is given a nightmarish interlude with sour, muted trumpets, whose feverish character belongs to the world of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, which Shostakovich orchestrated the same year as the symphony — a work that defines a declamatory, jocular morbidity particular to Russian music. At one point, a group of soldiers cross the ice, distant in the mist, before disappearing again with their patriotic song.

Earlier in the movement a fetid tuba solo suggests the dragon Fafner’s cave in Wagner’s Siegfried. The stupid hero of that opera goes to fight the serpent so he can learn what fear is, and slays the beast; Yevtushenko and Shostakovich aren’t so sure that fear is so easily beaten, that perhaps monsters are not ‘dying out in Russia’. One of its greatest worries is ‘the fear of not being fearless / when painting on a canvas or drafting a sketch’; in other words, it captures the impulse to self-censor or spiritually capitulate as an artist.

Shostakovich lived in the shadow of the Zhdanov Doctrine of 1946, which saw him and his colleagues Prokofiev, Kabalevsky, and Khachaturian (among others) directed to denounce anything outside the strictures of Socialist Realism. Shostakovich wrote a satirical cantata on these principles in 1948 called Antiformalist Rayok, which he had wanted to finally publish in the 60s, but could not because of the controversy arising, ironically enough, from the Babi Yar Symphony. Kirill Kondrashin, who premiered the work, would eventually end up in exile himself, like Shostakovich’s friends Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich.

The finale is Yevtushenko’s ‘A Career’, an agile and bitterly ironic poem about freethinkers dishonoured by their cowardly colleagues. Galileo, Newton, Shakespeare, and Pasteur are held up for their defiance; their detractors, who sling mud at them, are bitterly indicted as selfish cynics.

The soloist is introduced by a puffed-up busybody bassoon, but the movement opens with a demented little waltz, utterly banal in its construction and curdled with a couple of queasy dissonances. One critic likened its easygoing nature to the tune a happy artisan whistles on their way to work; I think its obsessive and repetitive character — small musical intervals circling back on themselves interminably, deliberately uninspired — suggests a kind of delusional, blithe mania: the middle-manager whose morality has been completely corroded by institutionalisation. It is partly redolent of Viennese operetta: in 1962 Shostakovich reworked the music of Moscow, Cheryomushki for a splashy film version of the 1958 comic satire on Khrushchev’s policy of throwing up glorious new apartment blocks; Shostakovich felt (wrongly) ashamed of the piece. An exquisitely delicate passage for pizzicato strings could have come straight from Johann Strauss.

If the other movements bear the weight of social and historical reckoning, ‘A Career’ is a set of index cards for Shostakovich’s experiences as a composer, such as a turbulent fugue for the orchestra showcasing his contrapuntal expertise (like Bach, he wrote his own set of piano pieces on that model). The waltz circles back in the final pages of the piece in a simple duet for solo violin and viola, the orchestra shrinking to chamber-like proportions. The string quartet was Shostakovich’s most treasured and private form, and its sudden appearance on a vast orchestral stage is disarmingly intimate and sad, capturing the difficulties of reconciling his artistic truth with what was professionally permissible. In 1960 he completed his Eighth quartet, dedicated to the ‘victims of war and fascism’, is also a memoir of the composer’s near-suicidal despair and fury about Stalinism. A smaller shrine than Babi Yar, it incorporates a Jewish folk melody into its savage second movement — Shostakovich making his musical identification with Jews, just as Yevtushenko would make his poetic one.

The final bars are scored for celesta and strings, in an uncanny recollection of the ending of his Symphony No.4 (which, like ‘A Career’, also spots a solo bassoon at its outset) — a work he withdrew after the controversy over his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, denounced by Stalin as muddle instead of music.  (There’s no doubt the opera was on his mind in 1962, as he revised into an acceptable form under the title Katerina Izmailova.) The Fourth Symphony was finally premiered by Kondrashin the year before Babi Yar, and Shostakovich’s choice of these textures for his coda is surely a nod to the most troubled and frightening part of his career, when every night he waited for the NKVD to take him away, suitcases packed in the hall so as not to disturb his family.

It’s the very delicacy of its conclusion that is so moving. The evanescent textures of strings and celesta — whose tinkling could be from The Nutcracker or Die Zauberflöte — is a remarkable orchestral coup, as we suddenly glimpse the hallowed nature of art, and its special status and responsibility. Among them, it turns out, is to dream and enchant, as well as tell stark and obdurate truths.