Mark’s Score 5 stars
Like many a Russian artist Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) struggled under the iron fist of Sovietic censorship – as the golden boy one moment only to be denounced as elitist and bourgeois the next. His biographers relate the story that he kept a packed bag ready and waiting in order not to awaken his family when the inevitable knock on the door came. A prodigy Shostakovich had completed a dozen works by the age of 20. The following 10 years were prolific with the composition of a 4th symphony, various operas and ballets, incidental music for plays or films – all under Soviet patronage. Then came his first denouncement in 1936 as Stalin took exception to his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District – declaring it (a) ‘muddle instead of music’. Sounding very much like the criticism laid at Mozart’s feet of ‘too many notes’ it was criticised for representing the Soviet worker lacking any folkloric charm or authenticity.
This sudden campaign against him also served as a signal to others in the fields of art, architecture, theatre and cinema, with the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, film director Sergei Eisenstein, and theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold among the prominent targets. More widely, 1936 marked the beginning of the ‘Great Terror’, in which many of the composer’s friends and relatives were imprisoned or killed.
Perhaps to appease his detractors and to reduce the prevalent suspicions about his artistic motives Shostakovich composed something on a less grand scale- his first string quartet in 1938. This Flinders Quartet (FQ) concert included selected movements from all but one of these 15 works. The title of the concert reflects the life and output of this dynamic and dramatic composer. The early quartets are lighter and embrace elements of rustic airs typically styled in accordance to Western Romanticism – “Uncle Joe” must have felt quite victorious. However the quartets grow darker and employ the atonality and chromaticism (a twelve pitched music scale) he is renowned for. Indeed he was a poly-stylist who developed a hybrid voice, combining a variety of different musical techniques as heard in the later quartets (Nos 8 – 12 in particular). His music is characterized by sharp contrasts, elements of the grotesque, and ambivalent tonality. The composer was also heavily influenced by the neo-classical style pioneered by Igor Stravinsky, and (especially in his symphonies) by the late Romanticism of Gustav Mahler.
Punctuating the concert’s music was a pre-recorded narration by Richard Piper that drew out many of Shostakovich’s personal motivations for these quartets. The FQ musicians attacked the compositions with bravura and total commitment, the violins in ‘great debate’ with the cello and viola is breathtaking stuff. The last pieces, 1970-74 compositions, have an introspective meditation on mortality. In fact Shostakovich decreed that the first movement of No15 should be performed without pause and so slowly “that flies drop dead in mid air and the audience start to leave the hall from sheer boredom”. Fair dues I say to have your work expressed how you wish. Especially for an artist who, as friends have commented post Perestroika, felt an anxiety all his life, was a mass of quirks and ticks, nervous in the presence of people he did not know.
Borrowing from Lord Tywin Lannister (Game of Thrones) it is often said that lions do not concern themselves with the opinions of sheep (being a riff on the Russian saying ‘the wolf doesn’t care about the sheep’s fear’) hence the overarching manipulation in Shostakovich’s artistic and personal life reflects the plight of the many living under dictatorship. He said that he would have composed sweeter more lyrical work if things had been different. Is this his underlying tragedy?
Mark G Nagle – On Sounds
