Opus 17: Two Pieces by Scarlatti (1928)

Two Pieces by Scarlatti, op. 17 (1928)
CD: “Dmitri Shostakovich: Orchestral Works”, Soloists Ensemble, Gennady Rozhdestvensky (BMG/Melodiya 74321 59058 2)

Following Shostakovich’s “Tea for Two” arrangement in the catalog are two more transcriptions, these pieces by the Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti (1685 – 1757) scored for a small wind band.

This is an extremely minor outpost of Shostakovich’s oeuvre and so I had the benefit, if you’d call it that, of coming into it almost completely cold:  I didn’t know the Shostakovich work, I don’t know the original Scarlatti works, I didn’t read the album liner notes (which offer only one sentence about opus 17), and I don’t know anything about why Shostakovich chose to arrange these pieces or use this particular instrumentation.  It’s a fun prospect to get introduced to an unknown work by a familiar composer, even if in this case it is seven-plus minutes of reorchestrated Baroque music:  Primarily, is it any good to listen to?  But also, what seems to be its intent; why does it exist?  What’s Shostakovich’s angle?

I don’t want to overstate the “why” questions, especially for an obviously minor work — a symphony has something of a thesis, while a little concert work often enough just aims to please.  But even at that, my first impression of the first piece, the Pastorale, was that it doesn’t have much reason for being.  It’s a colorful arrangement, and charming enough, but it feels arbitrary in how it divides its melodic lines among the wind instruments.  (Nothing like Anton von Webern’s reworking the geometry of Bach’s “Musical Offering” by divvying up the subject, not that either Shostakovich’s source material or transcription aspire to those works’ serious-mindedness.)  I didn’t hear much of Shostakovich in it, save for a barely perceptible trace of his humor in the way he isolates a quick descending run in the clarinet:

The phrase “Ted Turner colorization” sprang to mind on that first hearing (not that I remember seeing any colorized movies on TNT, but I do remember reading Orson Welles’ late-in-life injunction, referring to Citizen Kane, to “keep Ted Turner and his goddamned Crayolas away from my movie”).  Shostakovich’s bright instrumentation, combined with the characteristically reedy sound of eastern European woodwinds and some wobbly moments in the performance, gives it just a little bit of garishness.

From the beginning of the Capriccio that follows, though, Shostakovich makes Scarlatti’s music much more his own, adding some modern musical slapstick (I’m thinking mainly of more of those short trombone slides) and tweaking the overall tone into slightly folksy comedy:

When I wrote earlier that “Tahiti Trot” doesn’t have an ironic posture, the Capriccio’s is the kind of attitude I was referring to.  There’s nothing cold or mean-spirited in it, but Shostakovich’s orchestration seems inherently self-conscious, as though in recasting (and gently parodying) part of a Scarlatti keyboard work as a miniature orchestral farce it necessarily calls attention to itself.  I had more fun listening to this one; I’m a big fan of the young Shostakovich’s high-spirited musical clownishness and I like hearing new instances of it.

All that said, after listening to both pieces just a couple more times the above first impressions, as over-thought as they look on the page, do soften and fade into each other — on a subsequent pass I hear more humor in the first piece, while the farcical elements jump out less, and seem less self-aware, in the second.  What happens to first impressions (of music, or of anything) as you record back over theme is a topic for another time, as is, perhaps, what happens when you listen to something with too much intent to come away with a solid opinion of it; these are already too many words to spend on a pleasantly witty footnote to Shostakovich’s compositional career.

Opus 16: “Tahiti Trot” (“Tea for Two” by Vincent Youmans) (1927)

“Tahiti Trot” (“Tea for Two” by Vincent Youmans), op. 16 (1927)
CD:  “Shostakovich: The Jazz Album”, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly (London 433 702 – 2; currently issued on Decca)

“Tahiti Trot” is Shostakovich’s first work in chronological order that I have deep, abiding, warm feelings for.  I’ve been listening to this track consistently since I was in high school and by now it’s become like musical comfort food, soothing and enjoyable for its well-worn familiarity.  I think most people have songs like this; mine happens to be Soviet light-orchestra music, which feels slightly embarrassing, but so be it.

The tune is Vincent Youmans’ jazz standard “Tea for Two”, which, still new in the late 1920s, apparently swept the USSR much as it did the U.S.  (There it was retitled “Tahiti Trot”, I guess to appeal more to the foreign market or to preserve the alliteration in translation.)  Shostakovich legendarily reorchestrated it on a bet, from memory and in less than an hour; for a while his formidably charming arrangement became one of his own greatest hits in his home country.

It’s a humorous setting but, in contrast to the music of to the soon-to-be-completed The Nose, there’s no ironic posture in it, no cool or self-conscious framing.  Shostakovich embraces the catchiness of the melody and, over the piece’s three and a half minutes, presents it in a series of amiable instrumentations.  It’s bright and original, though barely continuous with the wilder colors of the opera and the second symphony, except perhaps for a preponderance of mallet percussion and some gently jokey trombone glissandi:

I love the rich strings at the end of that excerpt above — in the hard-to-place way that an orchestration sounds characteristic of a composer, it just sounds like Shostakovich.  And since “Tea for Two” is one of my favorite earworms on its own, they are, as the Reese’s folks used to say, two great tastes that taste great together.  I don’t think it should push Ella Fitzgerald out of anyone’s heart but it’s a worthy version of the song.

Riccardo Chailly’s “Jazz Album” with the Concertgebouw Orchestra is a justly popular album and the first essential Shostakovich disc of this blog-through.  (A disclaimer:  Nothing on the album remotely resembles actual jazz music, even by the standard of “King of Jazz” Paul Whiteman‘s orchestra in 1920s America.)  And you really should listen to it as a full album, as the selections balance each other nicely and show off a good swath of the composer’s lighter side:  Besides the “Tahiti Trot” it includes Shostakovich’s quirkily orchestrated Jazz Suite No. 1; the less idiosyncratic but still fun Suite for Promenade Orchestra (now and seemingly forever mislabeled as his Jazz Suite No. 2), whose Waltz No. 2 became an improbable breakout hit from the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack and an Andre Rieu party piece; and, bridging the divide between Shostakovich’s light music and his more serious concert fare, his first piano concerto.  Chailly directs everything with a light touch and glossy charm; it’s just a delightful disc.  I’ve found that as I’ve dug into Shostakovich’s bigger, more psychologically complex works (most of the symphonies, the string quartets) that knowing his straightforward song-and-dance works helps me appreciate what’s going on in the light-music episodes (frequently distorted and caustic) that constantly occur within his bigger canvasses.  More than that, though, it’s just the other, brighter side of his stylistic coin, well-crafted and worthy music on its own terms.

Opus 15: The Nose (1928)

The Nose, op. 15 (1928)
CD: Soloists, Chorus, and Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater, Valery Gergiev (Mariinsky MAR0501)

And how came the nose into the baked roll? And what of Ivan Yakovlevitch? Oh, I cannot understand these points — absolutely I cannot. And the strangest, most unintelligible fact of all is that authors actually can select such occurrences for their subject! I confess this too to pass my comprehension, to — — But no; I will say just that I do not understand it. In the first place, a course of the sort never benefits the country. And in the second place — in the second place, a course of the sort never benefits anything at all. I cannot divine the use of it.

– Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose” (1835-36)

This is the earliest of Shostakovich’s works that I’ve seen performed live:  This spring my brother Jack and I met up in New York to see William Kentridge’s production at the Metropolitan Opera.  My thoughts on that show from a few months ago are here; Jack’s more concise reaction is here.  I claimed earlier that for this exercise I’d prefer videos of stage works to audio-only recordings, and there is a DVD production out there — but I had already bought this Mariinsky CD set to get familiar with the music before the New York trip, so with the Met staging fresh in my mind, as well as a sense of budgetary restraint for the blog project, I settled for listening through it again with the album’s included full dual-language libretto in hand.

I’d highly recommend that before you experience this opera you read its source, Gogol’s short story “The Nose”, not just because it’s very helpful in understanding what Shostakovich is up to, but because Gogol’s writing is hilarious.  (A not very copyright-compliant-looking copy is here, as of this writing.)  The plot — Major Kovalev’s nose mysteriously deserts his face and impersonates a State Councilor, only to return just as mysteriously — is pleasantly absurd, but the greater pleasure is Gogol’s send-up of a class of bureaucratically-minded 19th-century St. Petersburg residents, in particular in his characters’ absurd, officious, self-serving, and digressive speech.  Part of the opera’s function is to lovingly enact a series of these characteristically Gogolian episodes, which Shostakovich and his co-librettists track closely; in order to feel its charm it’s vital to know what’s being said, and (unless, I would guess, you speak Russian) it’s easier and more pleasurable to do that through the original story than through a live show or DVD’s subtitles (usually abridged) or by attempting to read along in real time.

Another joy of Gogol’s story is the attitude of the narrator; that voice is absent from the opera but the spirit of the music, particularly the orchestral setting, is analogous, although the it’s the composer rather than the writer whose authorial presence comes through.  Shostakovich here is at his most sprawling and expansive yet, using a musical language close to that of the preceding second symphony but much finer and more characterful in its detail work.  It’s provocative music, in that it stands in self-conscious contrast to the grand opera tradition:  It doesn’t break down the fourth wall a la Brecht but the musical setting maintains an ironic distance from the action onstage and keeps up an unremittingly satirical tone.  Especially early on, Shostakovich creates a constantly shifting, high-contrast musical surface:  In the first act, for instance, a thrilling, forward-charging interlude for percussion alone barrels straight into Kovalev’s introduction, a clownish mock-aria based on “the ‘B-r-rh!’ with his lips which he always did when he had been asleep”:

It’s striking and deeply enjoyable music but it also becomes wearying over its two-hour length (not counting intermissions).  The vocal lines are almost perversely unmemorable; they do at least allow the characters, as buffoonish as they are, to express some of pathos, while the orchestra’s affect never seems to vary beyond smirking social observation, general agitation, or all-out carnival atmospherics.  It seems strange to compare Shostakovich to Boulez but my reaction to, say, Boulez’ “Sur Incises” is similar to my feeling as The Nose plays on:  It’s a phenomenally engaging musical landscape but, although the music constantly changes moment to moment, over its whole run it begins to feel static, its range of motion limited.

The opera’s dramatic momentum works similarly, and I would guess that a given viewer’s or listener’s patience over time will track closely with their interest in meticulously set Gogolian dialog.  Even with my own great interest in this, the plot starts to go slack early in Act III (probably not coincidentally, in a scene synthesized by the librettists rather than taken directly from the short story) as a series of characters board a stage coach while the police lie in wait for the Nose.  This scene contains the opera’s only great misstep:  A woman selling bubliki (bagel-like bread rolls) enters and is harrassed by the police, in a moment that I believe Shostakovich and co. wanted to be comical, although I find it ugly and out of joint with the rest of the opera’s lightness of touch:

I do find an intriguing thematic connection, though, between the market woman’s sales-pitch song here (monotone repetitions of “bubliki” and “kupitye”, translated in the Mariinsky booklet as “buy some”) and Shostakovich’s distant second cello concerto (opus 126, composed in 1966), whose cello part borrows an Odessa street song with the same purpose and words (“Kupitye bubliki”) and whose soloist is similarly, if much more abstractly, harangued by the orchestra.  Musically the ideas are unrelated, so I don’t think it’s a strong connection, but I still wonder if Shostakovich had the early operatic scene in mind when he composed the later work.  (The opera itself had been suppressed and/or lost, like so much of the composer’s early work, for decades at that point; Gennady Rozhdestvensky first revived it in 1974.)

I don’t want to end by sounding too down on the opera, which ultimately makes for a brilliant musical spectacle.  Highlights abound:  Shostakovich’s appropriately churchy, sepulchural mood music as Kovalev confronts the Nose in the Kazan Cathedral (the composer, an atheist living in an atheistic state, never wrote sacred music, so this, despite its scrim of irony, may be his closest approach); Kovalev’s loopy exchange with an unsympathetic newspaper editor.  A pure musical delight is a folk song sung by Kovalev’s servant to balalaika accompaniment (and eventually, incongrously, an added flexatone), which despite the excesses of Ivan’s vocals is played fairly straight by Shostakovich and folded into the musical mix:

The conclusion of the opera — sorry to spoil its very end — contains my favorite character work.  Kovalev’s nose has been reaffixed to his face and he, never understanding what happened and having learned nothing from the event, strolls down the Nevsky Prospect and flirts with a salesgirl, full of joy verging on smugness and simple self-regard.  The brittle and lilting music (with that antic flexatone again) perfectly captures his state of mind, before a last drum crash abruptly drops the curtain:

Opus 14: Symphony No. 2, Dedication to October, in B Major (1927)

Symphony no. 2, Dedication to October, in B Major, op. 14 (1927)
CD:  Shostakovich: Symphonies No. 2 & 3, London Voices, London Symphony Orchestra, Mstislav Rostropovich (Teldec D 115626; now rereleased on Warner Classics)

(Drumroll)
Men: Here is the banner…
Deeper-voiced men: Here are the names of living generations:
Men: October!
Women: The Commune!
All: And Lenin!
Orchestra: (Triumphant burble)

That pronouncement — spoken rather than sung, for maximal declamatory effect — comes at the end of Shostakovich’s second symphony; the work is his first expressly political one and that episode, about a minute out from the big finish, marks the composer’s first foray into what you could now call Soviet kitsch.  (The text comes from Alexander Bezymensky’s poem “To October”, which Shostakovich sets in the finale; I base my rendering on Richard Bannerman’s translation in the Teldec disc’s liner notes, which I make somewhat but not a whole lot less comprehensible, with an assist from Google Translate.)  The work as a whole, though, exhibits an experimental flair completely absent from the composer’s later, more squarely bombastic official works.  In 1927 such music was still acceptable in the USSR; within half a decade or so it would officially be deemed “formalist”, bourgeois, unintelligible to the masses, etc., and suppressed until the 1960s.

Shostakovich wrote his Symphonic Dedication to October, eventually designated as his symphony no. 2, on a commission to mark the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution.  It runs about twenty minutes long in a single movement with a choral finale; the customary knock against the work (and against the similarly structured third symphony) is that the modernism of the purely instrumental section is out of joint with the musically conservative, propagandistic chorus.  On listening to it now, though — it feels like my first genuinely close read of the piece, though I’ve owned this Rostropovich album for years and played it consistently, if not regularly, since then — I don’t hear an unbridgeable stylistic gap between the beginning and end.  Shostakovich primarily seems intent on writing conventional vocal lines, which pulls the instrumental setting into more familiar harmonic territory, but the work’s fiery intensity provides continuity, even though mostly transmuted into over-the-top bombast.

That intensity isn’t precisely a selling point; in place of emotional complexity Shostakovich relies on restless energy and piled-on instrumental textures, which can be exhausting at least as easily as thrilling.  (I was really grooving to it on my first, fresh listen-through, for what that’s worth, although a less familiar listener could fairly judge my now-automatic affection for anything that sounds recognizably like Shostakovich to compromise my judgment.)  The work opens with inchoate murmurings in the strings, from which more definite shapes take form; about three minutes in, trumpet calls begin to rise out of the fog, in a nice atmospheric touch:

This gives way via a murky tuba solo to a forward-charging section which, after two quick, swelling climaxes gives way to an extended violin solo.  This provides a respite, though it’s joined soon enough by the clarinet and, ultimately, a huge, fidgety mass of instrumental textures:

Shostakovich’s later music continues to break into march episodes, seemingly out of nowhere — and I’m at risk of gushing joyfully about every single example — but I like how this instance, recognizable by about the 24-second mark in the clip, forms up out of a dust cloud of musical material in contrast to his typically more staid transitions further on in his career.  I don’t think he could have known Charles Ives’ music — in this piece Shostakovich tilts at polytonality from a different angle — but the passage seems on the verge of becoming a Fourth, curiously Soviet, Place in New England.  The end of the excerpt above also gives a sense of the overripe chords that Shostakovich’s orchestra starts biting into on its way into the chorus.

Here’s the opening of the vocal part, to contrast with the examples above.  The voices are stern here as Bezymensky details some revolutionary hardships (“We kept on walking, we asked for work and bread. / Our hearts were held tight in the vice of despair.”), though they become predictably more ecstatic later.  The poem is breathlessly propagandistic and overly worshipful of the recently deceased Lenin; Shostakovich disdained it to his friends at the time, though his music gives it full-throated expression.

The remaining bit worth noting is a downward-stepping theme that the composer recycled years later, in a blockier form, in the finale of his Twelfth Symphony, also composed in honor of the 1917 revolution — the motif forms up through the second half of the symphony but it’s most clearly expressed about two minutes into the choral section:

Shostakovich presumably reprises the theme in the twelfth because of the thematic connection, and perhaps too as a reminder of the existence of the older, still largely forgotten symphony.  Now the contrast between the two works doesn’t flatter the later one:  The second symphony, rather than following a tedious official program, comes off more as an abstract canvas on which Shostakovich showcases his musical possibilities, and presents a vision of what a native Soviet musical language could be.  It’s not his strongest or best-organized early work (and it’s something of a shame that it gets relatively more attention than his other works of the time, based on the popularity boost it gets from being included with the rest of his symphonies) but its adventurousness sets it apart from the similarly themed official works he wrote later on, once the turgid, socialist realist style of Soviet music was established and rigidly enforced.

Opus 13: Aphorisms (1927)

Aphorisms, op. 13 (1927)
CD:  Shostakovich: Piano Sonata No. 1, etc., Konstantin Scherbakov, piano (Naxos 8.555781)

Following on the heels of the first piano sonata, here is another quarter hour of piano music.  Although Shostakovich speaks the same harmonic language and concocts the same sort of spiny melodies, however, Opus 13 has a very different personality from Opus 12.  Aphorisms is a set of ten miniatures, spare and frequently written with dessicated wit.  But rather than a grab bag of odd musical jokes, its ten segments form a coherent little suite, to my ear more obviously structured than the constantly forward-rushing sonata.  I was surprised, too, by the amount of pathos mixed in with the parody.

Some of the work’s dry humor comes from the inappropriateness of its titles, those of individual pieces as well as that of the whole set:  As “aphorism” implies, each is a pithy musical statement, but rather than imparting wisdom (how could it?) it is cryptic and abstract.  The opening, clipped Recitative leads into a not particularly songful Serenade, full of syncopation and staccato pinpricks.  Next comes a punchier Nocturne, which only resembles night music in the gentle chiming of its final bars.

The ten pieces fit into a fast-slow-fast-slow scheme; following the Nocturne’s lowering of the lights is an affecting, minute-long Elegy.  Perhaps the aptness of the piece’s title is a kind of meta-joke but it’s a moment of earnest contemplation, with a surprising step here and there in the bass line creating a slightly detached mood:

The following Funeral March isn’t a march but something like an illustration of a procession passing by, with a trumpet fanfare figure becoming more insistent and then fading over the course of a minute and a half; the tone is ironic again but the color still dark.

A thirty-second-long, rather tightly wound Etude speeds the set back up, and the Danse Macabre laces the famous, ominous Dies Irae tune into a scurrying, theatrical episode:

The Canon is a jumpy clockwork of angular, staccato gestures; the ninth piece, “Legend”, dials the set back down to a more pensive mood.

In its last and longest segment, the Cradle Song, the irony of Aphorisms‘ misnamed titles becomes darker:  The song, despite its ornamental turns, lacks the reassuring tone of a lullaby, instead building a worried and searching mood over the persistent, restless, two-note rocking of the bass line, until a final soft chord like a clock chime brings the work to an unsettled end.  The music never becomes too outwardly emotive but I’m still surprised at the depth reached here, not least because (despite the Elegy and Funeral March) the music that comes before it would seem to set up a brighter punchline.  It says something about Shostakovich’s worldview, as it comes through in his music — there is humor, there is youthful exuberance (the composer in 1927 was still just 21 years old), but underlying it there is darkness and uncertainty.  It’s tempting to pin this on the historical context of the young USSR in the late twenties, which was in the process of tipping over into outright tragedy, but it’s the universality of that uncertainty that makes the music resonate.

The ten pieces here are built to the same scale as the Three Fantastic Dances and Scherbakov renders the two works similarly, with a Gallic, Satie-appropriate clarity and reserve that contrasts with the excesses he brings to the opus 12 sonata.  There’s no need to pursue the disc as a whole, rather than picking up individual selections as single downloads or via Naxos’ online library, but it’s still adding up to a solid album.

Opus 12: Piano Sonata No. 1 (1926)

Piano Sonata no. 1, op. 12 (1926)
CD: Shostakovich: Piano Sonata No. 1, etc., Konstantin Scherbakov, piano (Naxos 8.555781)

I listened to the first piano sonata a couple of times, on Friday and again on Sunday morning. This fudges a little bit my declared one-piece-a-day process, although I don’t think it deviates from my intent, i.e. not burning out on Shostakovich and listening through his works in more or less chronological order, without skipping ahead of the piece I want to write about at the moment. Besides, multiple hearings and a weekend to think about it gave me more of a foothold on the sonata than my first impression gave me. In fact, I’ve owned this Scherbakov album for a couple of years, but though I must have listened to the piece since buying it (I’m not the type to buy music and then abandon it on a shelf, neglected and still shrink-wrapped) I found going into it this time that I had absolutely no memory of what it sounded like.

In fact the sonata, although it stands out from Shostakovich’s later, more famous, considerably better known style, doesn’t offer much in the way of melody or obvious structure to grab on to. Following in the path of the Scherzo from Opus 11, he makes a running leap away from the more tradition-bound first symphony into a dissonant, freely developing space — whatever the mood of the music at any given moment, his giddiness at escaping the strictures of his conservatory education beams through. The work is fifteen minutes long and through-composed, though a semblance of a four-movement structure forms out of it: an energetic opening leads into a satirical dance, something like an elephantine polka; an extended, quietly low-rumbling section in the second half leads into a bigger finale. The theme introduced in the first bars is developed throughout and other material appears and mutates as the sonata progresses, but melodic development is submerged below a constantly moving musical surface. Its brashness provides its charm, but it’s not very winsome music, even beyond the fact that it doesn’t try to be pretty: Composers outside of Russia at the time had already walked further away from Romantic, traditionally tonal music (Alban Berg’s landmark atonal opera Wozzeck would appear shortly; in America, Charles Ives, though his work was little known in his lifetime, was already playing with a deeper form of controlled musical anarchy) and in any case Shostakovich’s thrills at rejecting musical tradition seem to me to have faded over the decades, the sonata’s style being a transitional state rather than a viable destination in itself. It’s neither that grabby nor, in the broad view, that far out. It is worth noting that a piece like the first sonata was publishable in the Soviet Union of the time — the concept of an acceptable, non-“formalist” musical art accessible to the working-class masses had not yet congealed, nor had the arbiters within the Soviet bureaucracy begun to insist, as they would with varying degrees of aggression over the following decades, on a thoroughly conservative musical language. But although I like the piece as an expression of the energy and possibilities of the young Shostakovich I don’t find it too appealing otherwise.  I will guess that it’s more fun in concert, when all the clanging around on the piano (especially at the low end) would have more of an effect acoustically and the moment-to-moment surface of the music would feel more immediate.

A couple of stray notes on the music: On my second pass through the music I noticed that the shape of the first eight notes of the main theme — an upward jump, descending triplet, another upward leap, a short drop-off —

— bears a passing but (I have to presume) completely coincidental resemblance to the wider-intervalled and more heroic title theme John Williams used fifty years later in his Star Wars score (about 0:15 to 0:20 in the famous title crawl, after the fanfare). I find this connection both meaningless and, once I’ve heard it, impossible to shake.

Also — although I won’t jump ahead in my listening to verify this, since it would certainly violate my artificially cultivated, chronological context for hearing Shostakovich’s music — a downward-running figure appears within the dance-like segment of the sonata which is, I think, reproduced more or less verbatim by the soloist in one of Shostakovich’s cello concertos:

At risk of seeming perversely self-constrained, I’ll make a note to revisit this point several months from now, when I’ve reached the works of the 1950s and ’60s.

Next Week in Shostakovich

Among other site improvements, I’ll eventually have to put up my working copy of the exhaustive work list, to offer some look-ahead as well as show my progress.  Not much progress yet.  I haven’t exactly tallied up what I expect to listen to, but Shostakovich’s opus numbers run up to 147, and I’m at 11 right now; plus there are the works sans opus to account for.

At any rate, next week continues with a couple more piano pieces, a symphony that isn’t precisely a symphony, and a full-length opera about a man whose nose becomes a civil servant.  And then, if I get that far, Shostakovich’s singular but successful jaunt into the Great American Songbook.

Opus 11: Two Pieces for String Octet (1924-1925)

Two Pieces for String Octet, op. 11 (1924-1925)
CD:  Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 3, etc., Borodin Quartet and Prokofiev Quartet (BMG/Melodiya 74321 40713 2)

This one’s been at the periphery of my knowledge of Shostakovich’s music for more than a decade, since this 1964 recording by the Borodin and Prokofiev Quartets came included with the Borodins’ Shostakovich quartet box set that I picked up the summer before I started college.  (The BMG release is out of print, their partnership with Melodiya having expired; Melodiya has rereleased it on CD under their own brand, although the line apparently isn’t being marketed in the U.S.)  I’ve listened to it often enough over the years but without forming a clear mental concept of it.  I also missed a Portland performance of it this summer at Chamber Music Northwest’s festival, which I never manage to hear as much of as I think I will before the concerts have to compete with the rest of my summer plans.

The Prelude isn’t a bad piece but not a very gripping one either.  Temperamentally it fits in with the Opus 8 trio, although it has more of an experimental vibe — gently experimental, by the standards of non-Russian music at the time — as Shostakovich continues to test new techniques.  He achieves some nice effects, for instance, early on, the vaporous passage excerpted below, but for me the Prelude doesn’t add up to more than a series of moody, sometimes evocative parts.

The Scherzo — an early example of Shostakovich ironically titling a movement, perhaps, since this second piece is violent and not particularly jokey — has stuck with me more over time, on account of it’s pretty sweet, certainly when you’re a teenager and not acquainted with much chamber music.  Then I was drawn most to some wormy-sounding slides a few seconds before the end:

For its entire four-plus minutes, though, the Scherzo gets by on that level of frazzled energy.  On this listening I was grabbed more by the chattering statement of the movement’s main theme (here at about 0:45):

There’s something in Shostakovich’s melodic development in both of these pieces — in all of his works so far, actually, including the noticeably better-crafted first symphony — that sounds more repetitive, more rigid, less surprising than in his fully mature style in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on, but the second piece here is certainly kinetic and abrasively charismatic enough to hold a listener’s attention for under five minutes.  The sound quality of this recording isn’t great, par for the course from Soviet recording technology of the 1960s, but the Borodins and Prokofievs sound tight and a little bit of sonic grittiness isn’t a bad fit for the Two Pieces’ style anyway.  It’s not an essential work, and I’m not sure I’d recommend the Borodin Quartet’s cycle, as good as it is, over the Emerson Quartet’s more recent one, which is astonishingly well-performed, better engineered, and without a recording of Opus 11.  But the bracing Scherzo makes it a piece of early Shostakovich chamber music worth listening to.

Opus 10: Symphony No. 1 in F Minor (1924-1925)

Symphony no. 1 in F Minor, op. 10 (1924-1925)
CD:  “Shostakovich: Symphonies 1 & 9”, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Bernard Haitink (London 414 677 – 2)

That’s the beginning of Shostakovich’s first symphony, his first international hit (he was 19) and the first of what would become a monumental body of fifteen symphonies.  It was a joy to listen through this again yesterday, surprisingly so for the experience of listening to recorded music piped from my laptop through my television speakers, probably just because I’ve been holding back from listening to reams of his music while I’ve got Shostakovich on the brain.

This is also the first piece that I know pretty well, going back to when I was sixteen or so, though it must be at least two years since I’ve sat down and listened to the symphony.  Here I listened to the Haitink / London Philharmonic recording that I bought in high school, currently available as part of Decca’s more recent reissue of Haitink’s Shostakovich cycle.  His Shostakovich symphonies are good overall, based on those that I’ve heard, and he directs No. 1 with enough reserve to give it a lightness of touch without losing any energy or diminishing the piece’s key moments of real over-the-top brashness; I prefer it to the other two recordings I know well, Ormandy’s with Philadelphia (too affectless) or Neeme Järvi’s with the Scottish National Orchestra (likable but more heavy-handed).

The introduction excerpted above spins out into a bouncey theme and the first movement gradually stirs itself up.  After a couple of minutes the flute introduces the delicate second theme, a winking dance tune; the movement subsequently plays the two themes back and forth off of each other.  Shostakovich does a nice job of building and maintaining musical tension — for the most part (including at the movement’s end) the buildup doesn’t release so much as settle down, but my favorite moment in the symphony happens at about the halfway point when the music finally lets loose:

The end of that excerpt also suggests some of the symphony’s frenetic, darker edge — the innocuous little tune blows up into a musical cataclysm.

The second movement opens with a gamboling theme; Shostakovich charmingly gives it to the piano in a couple of places, a solo voice that dropped out of his symphonic pallette later.  Here it is around the 3:15 mark — the composer was working as a cinema pianist to help make ends meet while writing the symphony and, in full imaginative fanboy mode, I can’t help but imagine him working through this theme as accompaniment to a silent comedy:

The bulk of the second movement, though, belongs to a more exotic theme given a hazily atmospheric setting, very reminiscent of Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite and (less directly) Stravinsky’s early, folk-influenced works.  That influence is new to Shostakovich’s work but it’s pronounced in the rest of the symphony from this point on.

The third and fourth movements fit together as an abstract dramatic episode.  The third movement mostly works out a single, searching theme in a funereal mood, with drum and bugle gestures periodically rising up out of the fog, and is an obvious forerunner to Shostakovich’s many, later passacaglia slow movements (although I don’t have the ears to tell whether this is formally a passacaglia or not; it sounds freer in structure than that).  The symphony continues into its final movement without pause, via a snare drum roll, and continues in the same tone before introducing its own, tragic main theme.  The tragedy in the finale sounds theatrical rather than intimate — most literally at about the five-minute mark, when the tympani play a sequence of exposed, doomy drumbeats — but it is urgent and earnest.  The last-movement theme, which I clipped below from just before the work’s anxious, minor-key conclusion, has a broad, expressive lyricism of a piece with late-19th-century Russian music but also a rawness and Soviet-modern brashness, like Rimsky-Korsakov with a brushed steel exterior:

It’s a charming sound.  I’ve always listened to the first symphony in the context of the later fourteen so it’s interesting to come at it this way, when it stands out as the culmination of his student works.  Shostakovich uses better musical material here and, besides imitating Prokofiev’s sound, also uses more counterpoint here, or just keeps more musical elements in motion at once.  (Compare the Opus 7 scherzo, which uses a similar theme to the symphony’s second movement but mostly barrels straight ahead with it.)  It all comes together as a solid, characterful, expressive work of music, worthy of its popularity.

Some Biographical Notes

I haven’t worked out just how much of Shostakovich’s biography I want to lace in with my listener responses.  I’ve been gravitating towards doing so sparingly, except where it bears on my understanding or interpretation of a piece.  I don’t have anything to add that I didn’t read in a secondary source and, since I’m trying to write as extemporaneously as I can instead of composing a bunch of book reports, that mostly seems like an opportunity to get facts wrong.  In the near future I’ll at least enumerate the books I’ve read.

Today, though, since I got to phone in my post about the lost Opus 9, it seems worth mentioning some detail about Shostakovich’s time at the Petrograd Conservatory that I haven’t worked into a post yet.  First, his basically ordinary formal education (within which he produced, I think, all of the pieces I’ve listened to so far) was by no means guaranteed given the instability and economic difficulties in the years right after the October 1917 revolution.  The first pages of Laurel Fay’s second chapter in Shostakovich: A Life credit the head of the conservatory, Alexander Glazunov, with maintaining normalcy and particularly seeing to the needs of the gifted but sickly young Shostakovich.  Elizabeth Wilson, in her excellent Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, reproduces part a letter that Glazunov wrote to the relevant authority in order to obtain additional food rations for his student (“I humbly ask you not to refuse my request on his behalf to provide the means of feeding this most talented boy and building up his strength”).  Besides being an artifact of the times it seems like an odd sort of torch-passing from the old guard — Glazunov was a prestigious composer in his own right — to the new.  (For her part, Fay notes, but soft-pedals, the additional fact that Shostakovich’s father provided Glazunov with alcohol he procured illicitly from his Bureau of Weights and Measures job.)

Fay recounts a couple of other striking details.  In Shostakovich’s first winter at the Conservatory, the classrooms were unheated and students (when they attended, although Shostakovich himself was one of the diligent ones) could only remove their gloves to do exercises; his counterpoint instructor would skip classes and Shostakovich would track him down at his home.  Later in life, Shostakovich expressed fondness for those years because of his and his fellow students’ enthusiasm, which I find rather touching; I had a breezy childhood myself (and I wouldn’t have it any other way) but it’s interesting to me that young people are, in some ways, much more resistant to hardship than adults.  It’s true also that, notwithstanding Opus 6, Shostakovich’s student music hadn’t yet developed the searing intimacy of his later work — his personal difficulties aren’t audible in these early exercises.

It’s also worth noting, off topic, that Shostakovich studied piano as well as composition at the Conservatory, and was a very promising concert pianist early in his career:  This helps explain the higher percentage of piano works in his early output and the forwardness of the piano within his early orchestral works.