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San Diego Symphony opens new season with audience-interactive Carlos Simon commission

Can music without words have philosophical or rhetorical meaning? How does a listener assign such meaning to a purely instrumental work?

Two compositions performed during the San Diego Symphony’s season-opening concert on Saturday at the Rady Shell grappled with these questions.

Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5 was composed in 1937 at the height of Stalin’s purges. The previous year his opera “Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk” had been savagely attacked by Pravda. The premiere of his Symphony no. 4, written after this attack and one of his most musically challenging works, was mysteriously canceled, remaining unheard until 1961.

What can one make of the change in Shostakovich’s vocabulary during this period? Compared to the crunchy, uncompromising rhetoric of the Fourth Symphony, No. 5 uses broad, populist brush strokes.

For years there were two schools of thought. One held that Shostakovich, fearful of Stalin, dutifully composed a work to appeal to the masses. The other, popularized by Russian musicologist Solomon Volkov’s now-discredited book “Testimony,” which was purported to be Shostakovich’s memoir, was that his Fifth Symphony was an act of rebellion, expressing sentiments that could not be publicly aired.

In Gerald McBurney’s fascinating program notes, a third way to approach it is that Shostakovich larded the Symphony with quotes from Bizet’s “Carmen,” reflecting his lost love’s marriage to the film director Roman Karmen.

To my 21st century ears, the ridiculously loud major chord ending that emerges from the plodding minor key march of the last movement reeks of pompous mediocrity, no matter the intention.

However, Shostakovich did have a keen ear for orchestral sounds, and under Music Director Rafael Payare’s guidance, the Symphony musicians made the most of their solos and section work.

What about a new work by an African American composer called “Wake Up?” The title suggests Marcus Garvey’s exhortation “Wake up Africa!” 100 years ago, as well as Lead Belly’s 1938 admonition to African Americans to “stay woke.”

Composer Carlos Simon introduced the work to the audience as a concerto for orchestra, written for the renovation of Copley Symphony Hall. Percussionists play scrap metal from the hall, and his work invokes old Hollywood scores in recognition of the venue’s earlier incarnation as a movie theater.

Simon asked the audience to say “Wake up!” in unison to demonstrate the principal rhythmic motif of the piece. Yet he didn’t inform the audience about the poem that inspired him, “Awake, Asleep” by Rajendra Bhandari. Bhandari proposes that when an entire society is awake, that makes it more difficult for despots to lull them into a false sense of security. (It would have helped to have the poem printed in the program.)

How all of that figured into the music was unclear. We heard the “Wake up!” motif repeatedly, and during more static sections, it stirred up momentum. But the musical language suggests that pretty tonal harmonies are happy times, while dissonant sections are struggles to be overcome with more pretty chords.

The work ends with a rising series of clashing chords, landing on a cheerful B-flat triad. It’s much less forced than Shostakovich’s finale, but sounds just as hollow.

The poem suggests the opposite — to beware of beautiful lies spun by those in power, to challenge them by making all aware of their deceptions. Other works by Simon display his concern for social justice, but I got little sense of it in “Wake Up.”

Payare and the Symphony musicians played with care and emotion.

The high point of the evening was in Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor: no extramusical associations to ponder, just engaging melodies and powerful harmonies. The always amazing Alisa Weilerstein was the soloist, sculpting long lines with grace.

Payare and the musicians gave a characteristically exciting performance, savoring the lovely moments of the slow movement, and supporting Weilerstein with poise.

The symphony will perform this concert program once again on Friday when it returns to New York City’s Carnegie Hall for its first performance at the famous venue in a decade.

Hertzog is a freelance writer.