CYCLES.

In early October, the London Symphony, under the direction of Bernard Haitink, played the nine symphonies of Beethoven at Lincoln Center. At the end of the month, the Orchestra of the Maryinsky Theatre, under Valery Gergiev, unleashed six symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich in the same venue, concluding a yearlong survey of the complete cycle of fifteen. Implicit in this uptown avalanche of symphonism was the proposition that Shostakovich, whose centenary fell this year, belongs next to Beethoven at the heart of the repertory. That idea remains controversial in some circles--at every Shostakovich performance, I encountered a few people shaking their heads over his inclination toward grandiosity and brutality, his perverse manipulations of form, his habit of freezing harmonic movement while a seemingly trivial motif repeats maniacally--but the rest of the audience thundered its assent. There were many great symphonists in the twentieth century, but Shostakovich, like Beethoven, epitomized his age.

To hear the two cycles in sequence was to feel an agonizing spiritual shift. Beethoven finished his First Symphony in 1800, at a time when the French and American Revolutions were exciting intellectual hopes for the worldwide advance of the rights of man. Mark Evan Bonds, in a fascinating new book entitled "Music as Thought," notes that nineteenth-century listeners understood Beethoven's works as communal ceremonies in which "joy is achieved through synthesis" and the individual happily disappears into the whole. That's the drama of Beethoven's brawny, odd-numbered symphonies, from the Third through the Ninth, where scenes of a sombre, searching, soliloquizing nature give way to festivities of dancing or marching. In his major-key codas, Beethoven is so insistent on driving home his affirmative message that he runs the risk of sounding stupid. He does not care; joy is not a sophisticated state.

For Shostakovich, communal joy is essentially an alien emotion. Only once, in the Fifth Symphony, from 1937, does he present a classically Beethovenian, through-strife-to-the-stars narrative, and even then the cold magnificence of the finale creates unease. (This excludes the four propaganda symphonies on Communistic subjects, for which a triumphal close was required.) Sometimes the drama ends with a kind of giddy dementia (the First, the Tenth), sometimes with incongruous, faintly scandalous merrymaking (the Sixth, the Ninth), sometimes with a wan, tentatively positive resolution (the Eighth, the Thirteenth), sometimes with whimpering or clattering noises that evoke a death rattle (the Fourth, the Fourteenth, the Fifteenth). Shostakovich's world is a characteristically twentieth-century one, where the broad, straight road is closed off, where wholeness is no longer accessible, where the honest soul wavers between solitary brooding and heedless release.

Yet the two composers are not polar opposites. Beethoven, too, has his wry, perverse, morbid, obsessive moods. Think of the transfixingly strange Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony, when the music effectively stops moving and the timpanist drums lightly on the note C like a finger tapping on a pane. All the jubilation that follows can sound like an attempt to forget whatever existential threat the Scherzo poses. Conversely, Shostakovich at his bleakest still offers his listeners slivers of hope, usually in the form of cryptic jokes. The Sixth Symphony begins with an extended, multipart theme, a kind of solemn oration. In the second section, where you would expect to find a rigorous development of the initial material, Shostakovich instead picks out two details--a minor third and a decorative trill--and fixates on them in a fabulously eerie hundred-and-twenty-bar passage, as if to prove that he can hold you enthralled with next to nothing. At that moment, he and Beethoven are essentially playing the same occult symphonic game.

Haitink, a favorite guest conductor with the London Symphony and with many other orchestras, has the reputation of being a warm and wise musician who shies away from sonic ...