The Toledo Symphony Classics Concert Friday evening featured internationally acclaimed musician Ignat Solzhenitsyn in the dual roles of soloist and conductor. The program, subtitled “music that refuses to be silent” held only two works: Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in D minor.

To begin with, the programming may have a possible flaw; an entire evening of that much minor is a fearful Parnassus to ask any audience to face. However, in the hands of Solzhenitsyn, it simply became a palette upon which to unleash a burst of musical rhapsody that held the listener rapt beginning to end.

Solzhenitsyn began on the bench as soloist in the Beethoven. Quotes from E.M. Forester’s Room with a View on Miss Honeychurch’s Beethoven campaign ran through the mind as the performance unfolded: “The audience was in suspense all through the introduction, for not until the pace quickens does one know what the performer intends.  With the roar of the opening theme they knew that things were going extraordinarily; in the chords that herald the conclusion was heard the hammer strokes of victory.”

The performance was stunning. Solzhenitsyn played with a breathtaking fluidity, grace, and agility; the scope of his timbre, astounding. The symphony supported with sensitivity, subtlety, and nuance. Between them was a symbiotic bond of pure artistry. 

In the Shostakovich, Solzhenitsyn brought the soul of his heritage as he took the conductor’s platform, leading the entire 50-minute work without a score.  He held a clear understanding of the 20th century Russian aesthetic; the orchestra bristled with an underlying artistic longing, colorful, cold, searching and finally overwhelmingly triumphant.  

Unlike the Prokofiev earlier this season, the political struggle between the Stalinist censors and the composer’s artistic voice clearly surfaced. Passion vs. classicism, traditional tonality vs. an emergent tonal sonority, lyric romanticism vs. angular constructivism flowed in slithering, winding, widening confluence expertly executed by the orchestra’s musicians.

Solzhenitsyn is one of the great musical voices of our age. Educing the soul of this music with a voice that, as the subtitle suggested, not only refused to be silenced, but demanded the listener hear and understand.

The program will be repeated 8 p.m. this evening in the Toledo Museum of Art Peristyle, 2445 Monroe St., Toledo. Tickets and more information 419-246-8000 or toledosymphony.com.

Contact Wayne F. Anthony at classics@theblade.com.

First Published November 19, 2016, 6:10 a.m.