Shostakovich: Symphony No. 15 in A Major, Op. 141: IV. Adagio - Allegretto - Adagio - Allegretto

this last movement is my favorite. it's hard to find a recording where i can recreate how playing it last week felt, partly because we took it so slow, but it seems somehow right to me now. this is the only youtube recording i can find even remotely approaching it.

it begins with another low brass chorale, with something extra - a timpani death knell, with added interjections from a lone wood block. and then something so lovely so as to be out of place - violin melody which leads you on and on, somewhere undisclosed, so frail and without direction that breathing will break it. it goes nowhere. it's so easy to play this and phrase it according to its contour, but really it is even more haunting when it manages to stay perfectly still - singing while barely exhaling at all, as if really singing will somehow break one's voice.
this is followed by a passacaglia, and it finally builds into the a gigantic scream that is the entire symphony's second loud spot. it is beaten down by despair, with clarinet and bassoon solos that might have been plucky but are too exhausted to protest. the violins again, made even more achingly beautiful by the fact that they just aren't allowed to phrase, to speak, to say anything beyond a wordless toneless line which is supposed to somehow encompass one's whole existence.

and then the symphony simply dies, the violin's flat line on the heart monitor acknowledged by a ghost's procession of percussion and keyboard instruments that is inexorable, irrevocable, and completely unsympathetic. this last percussion section takes place over a glistening a major chord which lasts for a minute, and then evaporates. the writing for the percussion is amazing here - the steady tick tock of wood block and castanets, against the quarter, quarter, (eighth rest) eighth | quarter, quarter which gets passed through the piccolo, xylophone, and timpani. it's the grim reaper! or so my imagination likes to think. he is unpitying, and he doesn't care that you don't want it to end like this.

there is no sense of grief - nothing so gratuitous or healthy as that. there is only: the fact of life, then death; the remnants of a desire to change that fact; and the emptiness of that impossibility.
it's a symphony so personal that it feels almost insulting to clap after hearing it.