Matthew Gibson on Shostakovich Symphony No 7

Matthew Gibson, LSO Double Bass, listens to the LSO’s recording of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony and recalls performing it in December 2019.

‘As I sat down with the rest of the London Symphony Orchestra to perform Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in December 2019, it didn’t really occur to me that it might be the last time I would ever play the piece. But, as it happens, it turned out almost certainly to be!

My partner and I have decided to leave London for the leafy South Shropshire hills and a lifestyle a little more … agrarian. And I don’t think that the Shrewsbury Orchestral Society is quite up to Shostakovich. Not the Seventh Symphony.

In the last month I have been very involved with work at our property on the side of the Stiperstones. We cut down 120 trees from around the lake in order to allow more light to get in. Essential to create the right environment for the wild swimming pool we are wanting to create (very exciting!). I then had to carry all the brash to the shredding machine, carry six-foot lengths of trunk up the hill and arrange into piles, cut and split the trunks into logs and then arrange the enormous resulting log pile into organised walls of logs, three rows at a time, in order for them to dry, ready for burning. Back-breaking work! But very satisfying.

This week I took some time to listen to the recording of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony from that December 2019 concert, recently released on Apple Music Classical. It was the first time I’d heard the piece in Spatial Audio – the result is something quite special.

As I became immersed in the music, I began thinking back over all the different conductors that I have played the Symphony with, and was immediately transported back to the 1990s, and the complete Shostakovich cycle that we performed at the Barbican with Mstislav Rostropovitch — it nearly killed me! Two concerts of every symphony in the space of a few weeks; I had blood coming out of the ends of my fingers. But they were incredible performances, and Maxim Vengerov even played Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto. Unforgettable!

The Seventh Symphony was the subject for one of the first education projects I was involved with. We were in a church next to the Imperial War Museum in South London. I was very new to the LSO and didn’t really know anyone … or anything! But the words which Richard McNicol (an animateur and workshop leader) and the children came up with for the march in the first movement still live with me through every performance I’m involved with:

We’ll – fight – for freedom …
We’ll – fight – for freedom …

It’s amazing how these things stay with you. And I’m sure that it will have stayed with some of those children as well.

Another early education project I remember was with Hannah Conway, and centred on Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. I remember that we made words and music for the whole of the first movement. We performed it with the students in the afternoon at St Giles Cripplegate, across the water from the Barbican Centre. When it came to the actual performance later that evening with Leif Ove Andsnes and the LSO, the students could be clearly heard singing along through the whole of the first movement (much to the displeasure of some audience members) from the top of the balcony! Good on them, I say.

A few years later I was standing at a cash machine late at night on Streatham High Road, being cautious and swift at the same time, getting my cash but not wanting to loiter. I sensed a large figure approach behind me, and it became obvious he wasn’t going to pass me by. I tensed up and turned around, hoping that he just wanted access to the machine. ‘Ah, I thought so’, he said. ‘You’re that bass player guy who we did the Rachmaninoff with. I’ve started playing the bass now, thanks to you.’ Amazing the cultural exchanges that occur, on Streatham High Road! Anyway, I digress …

The thing about Shostakovich is that it is all about extremes.

He writes three fortes, or even four, quickly followed immediately by three or four pianos. So as a bass player you can really put every last ounce of strength and tension into your playing – and it still isn’t enough. But I do remember that the performance with Gianandrea was particularly fine. He was able to keep the music flowing while at the same time managing to eke out every last drop of emotion from the players.

When the march gives way to the sound of tanks approaching in the first movement (and once that idea has been put in your head, it is impossible not to imagine them) as a bass player you are practically sawing your double bass in half with every bow stroke. But ultimately it is unbelievably satisfying. It’s actually not so dissimilar to working on our land in Shropshire! It seems that whichever way I turn I am destined to be faced with exhaustion.

It turned out in the end to be a fantastic recording. In fact, the whole Shostakovich symphonic cycle with Gianandrea Noseda has been an incredible journey. It’s a journey well worth joining us on!’