Shostakovich, Boston Symphony Style

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” At the start of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s all-Shostakovich concert at Carnegie Hall on Thursday, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma invoked this darkly cynical statement attributed to Stalin. Addressing the capacity crowd, which included Shostakovich’s son Maxim, Ma added: “We play Shostakovich so that no death is ever just a statistic.”

Historians disagree on how Shostakovich, the Soviet Union’s most famous composer, felt about the political system that alternately boosted and threatened his career. But the juxtaposition of the individual and the collective, of a singular human experience set against the mass movements of history, drives much of the drama in his symphonic music.

During the orchestra’s two-night visit to New York, the Boston players, led by their music director Andris Nelsons, gave bravura performances of Shostakovich — his 11th and 15th symphonies, as well as the Cello Concerto No. 1 — that reveled in the sonic riches of this contradiction-laden music. But there was also an emotional reserve, even primness, to much of the playing that exacerbated the music’s ambivalence and left a listener with more questions than answers.

That is disappointing, given that Nelsons has made Shostakovich a central mission of his tenure in Boston. Last month, he and the orchestra capped a 10-year recording marathon of all the composer’s major works with the issue of a 19-disc box set, including Grammy-winning recordings.

The quality of the music-making at Carnegie Hall was never in doubt. The Boston brass section was a marvel of cohesion, whether in the reverent chorale that opened the second movement of 15th Symphony on Wednesday or in the harrowing violence of the second movement of the 11th, performed on Thursday, which depicts the brutal repression of a peaceful protest in St. Petersburg in 1905.

There were radiant solos on Wednesday by the principal cellist Blaise Déjardin and tartly virtuosic ones by the concertmaster, Nathan Cole. Shostakovich’s sarcastic humor was finely rendered in the first movement of the 15th with its cartoonish quotations of Rossini’s “William Tell” overture and in the militant jauntiness of the cello concerto’s first movement, in which the orchestra heckles the frenetic, hyperactive soloist.