For most of his life Shostakovich was paraded by the Russian communists as the premier musical spokesman for their socialist system. But Ashkenazy is in no doubt about the composer's real attitude to Stalin. "I was always sure Shostakovich hated the Soviet system, because we all hated it," he once told a UK reporter.
In his youth Ashkenazy was himself persecuted by Stalin's regime, dragged in off the Leningrad streets and roughly told to inform on his fellow students. So it will be fascinating to hear his interpretation of this particular work, dating as it does from a time when he was still living in the USSR.
In the book Testimony, published four years after Shostakovich's death, and offered to the public as his secret credo, the composer speaks frankly about his dissident, anti-Stalin, beliefs. "It's about Stalin and the Stalin years," is what he unambiguously writes about the 10th Symphony.
Whether or not Testimony was really written by Shostakovich, he certainly published what looks very like a mock confession about the 10th. The third movement was "a bit long," he wrote, "though here and there it is a bit short. It would be very valuable to have comrades' opinion on this." Clearly this was intended as a joke, so ridiculous that everyone would see through it, though hopefully not the senior Party officials.
Most probably the 10th Symphony is, as Ian MacDonald -- the Beatles and Shostakovich expert who so tragically took his own life last month -- wrote, "a musical monument to the 50 million victims of Stalin's madness and the supreme thing of its kind composed in the last half century." (The New Shostakovich, 1990)
MacDonald was a friend of mine and he told me on one occasion that the probable reason Shostakovich wasn't shot in the mass purges of the 1930s, when many famous Russian artists perished, was his value to the regime as an internationally famous name, and his supposed status as a major representative of socialist art.
Ashkenazy has spoken about his admiration for MacDonald's book, and endorsed its view of Shostakovich as a lifelong secret dissident.
Taipei is lucky to be seeing both Ashkenazy and the Philharmonia. Both have very busy work schedules. In addition to his position as Conductor Laureate of the Philharmonia, Ashkenazy is also chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic, musical director of the European Youth Orchestra, and will take up the post of Musical Director of Tokyo's NKH Orchestra for next year's season (he is already their musical adviser).
As well as all this, plus his recordings, he also undertakes one-off projects such as his arrangement of the score for Michael Cacoyannis's film of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, starring Charlotte Rampling, in 1999. As one of his friends put it, when Ashkenazy has five minutes free, he puts in ten minutes' work.
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