Vladimir Ashkenazy: Music to die for

To mark the 50th anniversary of Prokofiev's death, a festival will focus on his and Shostakovich's output under Stalin. Martin Anderson meets its artistic director, Vladimir Ashkenazy

"Papa, what if they hang you for this?" – as the titles of music festivals go, this one's hardly calculated to pull in the punters. But it does make explicit the basic condition under which Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and their contemporaries had to work in Stalin's Russia – constant fear of arrest, torture, deportation and death, fear trickling through everything you did, poisoning all but the most basic of human relationships.

The festival – a series of nine concerts and various other events – runs from 7 to 23 March on London's South Bank, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Prokofiev's death, on 5 March 1953, the same day as his chief tormentor, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aka Stalin. The artistic director of the festival is Vladimir Ashkenazy, long a vocal opponent of the intellectual laziness of those Western intellectuals who discuss the music of Shostakovich and Prokofiev without taking into account the ghastly society in which they had to live. His imaginative programming juxtaposes the "official" works that the two composers were obliged to write, with their more personal statements, underlining the differences in their creative response to permanent repression.

The "papa" of that title is Shostakovich himself; the question was whispered by his son Maxim during a rehearsal for the premiere of the 11th Symphony in 1957. The Soviet Union had invaded Hungary the year before; Shostakovich's not-so-cryptic response in his new symphony was to use anti-Tsarist revolutionary slogans whose unsung texts make his protest almost explicit: "Shame on you, tyrants", "Threaten us with prison and chains".

Shostakovich was a brave man in a society in which not even compliant conformity was a safe option: in music and deed, he often took risks that were almost suicidal. Prokofiev, by contrast, sought refuge in the ironical detachment that had always been a part of his musical language. He couldn't avoid being caught up in the political machinery, of course, but he kept it at an emotional distance.

Stalin was hot on film music, and so, of course, his composers had to do his bidding. Prokofiev's most memorable contribution to the genre came in the form of two monumental scores to Eisenstein epics: Alexander Nevsky, which is being screened to the accompaniment of the full orchestral score on 11 March, and Ivan the Terrible, excerpts of which will be heard in concert on 20 March. Shostakovich's film scores are less well known; of the three dozen or so that he wrote, extracts from two – The Fall of Berlin and The Unforgettable Year 1919 (both, coincidentally, just released on a new Marco Polo CD) – will also be performed at the 20 March concert.

Ashkenazy won't discuss the works themselves ("What can you say? I hate describing music"). But he has first-hand experience of the unfeeling cruelty with which the Soviet authorities controlled musical life, and empathises with the painful but inevitable compromises that were required of its composers: "Shostakovich managed to express the tragedy of the situation in his music, although he did write a few things in order to survive. His Fall of Berlin [1949] was a survival thing: that was the first time he glorified Stalin. It seems he might have been told: 'You know, they're preparing something really awful for you' – and why should he want to go to the Gulag? Imagine, had he been exiled, the pieces we would have lost – there would have been no 10th Symphony, no First Violin Concerto, many of the string quartets... What is the point? Better to write the glorification of Stalin, which was almost a ritual in our country; we could not refuse to do that. And everybody knew it had to be done, so what is the big deal? And in the Eighth and 10th Symphonies, the First Violin Concerto [to be heard on 16 March] and all those other works, he indicts the Soviet system to such a degree that there's no mistake about it."

Unlike Prokofiev, Shostakovich outlived the worst days of Stalinist terror. And just as he had danced his dangerous pas de deux with Stalin, he "managed" his relationship with the later Soviet authorities rather skilfully, too: as well as producing the odd composition, he would read out the speeches they wanted, sign the articles – he chose the battles that were worth losing so that he'd be left to get on with his music.

Ashkenazy immediately objects to my choice of word: "It wasn't 'skilful' – skilful is deliberately being clever in doing this and that. I think he couldn't help writing what he had to write to express himself. That's not being skilful. It was stronger than he was; he had to do it."

Would it be fair, then, to describe Shostakovich as a dissident ante diem? "I do not like to use the word 'dissident' in relation to Shostakovich. 'Dissidence' means something else – those people in Russia who were called 'dissidents' in the West were those who decided to expose the Soviet system's hypocrisy publicly, and weren't afraid of doing so, the people who demonstrated, who openly said what they thought; they were sent to camps, sent out of the country, etc. I still don't understand why they were called 'dissidents': they were not dissenting, they were exposing.

"Shostakovich never said anything publicly because he didn't need to – it was all in his music. Had he joined those so-called 'dissidents', he would have been prevented from composing and having his works performed. Shostakovich was a person of tremendous integrity, and his conscience dictated to him that he had to express the pain and suffering of his country, his people – as well as his own."

Prokofiev's behaviour provides a strong contrast with Shostakovich's tacit public-spiritedness: the centre of his interest seems to have been Prokofiev – not through especial vanity or arrogance but, as for many other composers, because his music was the most important thing in his life. Ashkenazy won't condemn him for it: "As a character, there are many contradictory reports about him, and I'm not in a position to pronounce on that." But he confesses his puzzlement: "One would have thought that an artist of that magnitude wouldn't be afraid to reflect what he saw around himself. To me, it is incomprehensible that he didn't do that. Some people might wonder about the integrity of the individual."

That suggests that he sees Prokofiev's habitual recourse to irony in such terrible times as some kind of moral shortcoming. But he insists that he will not judge. "Who am I to comment on the synthesis of this mysterious process, with components that, of course, include the gift, the character, and a myriad other ingredients? There is a finished product, and that's all we have. I am not a composer, and we don't really know how a composer's mentality and character get interwoven in the tortuous activity of distilling ideas into the final composition.

"We comment so much on the music that we hear, but we have no idea how it came to be born. You can judge the result up to a point, but perhaps only the composer knows what he was trying to say. And here is Prokofiev's style, his face – he couldn't help it. Even when the intention was to communicate points bordering on the tragic and dramatic – as in the Suite 1941 – even then, his music can sound ironic and flippant. And I can't imagine that he wanted it to sound like that, when Soviet soldiers were dying by the thousands on the front.

"Yet there won't be many people who would deny that in his masterpiece, the ballet Romeo and Juliet, Prokofiev's identification with the tragic end of the protagonist is anything but complete and universal. I wonder what role our genes play in the enigmatic activity of being a great composer."

'Papa, what if they hang you for this' – Prokofiev and Shostakovich under Stalin, is at the South Bank Centre, London SE1 (020-7960 4242; www.rfh.org.uk/prokofiev50) from 7 to 23 March. Details of other Prokofiev anniversary events at www.sprkfv.net