DownWithTyranny!: Sunday Classics: Sampling the world of Shostakovich's string quartets with Nos. 6 and 14

The American Quartet plays the opening movement of Shostakovich's Third Quartet.

by Ken

As I've been mentioning in Friday night's and last night's previews, next weekend the St. Petersburg Quartet, possibly the finest string quartet in the game today, complete's a six-concert series at Brooklyn's Bargemusic with the final three concerts of a series called "Celebrating the Complete Shostakovich and Late Beethoven String Quartets," which will encompass all 15 Shostakovich quartets with a Beethoven quartet included in each program (in the case of the first three programs, which took place last month, the three quartets of Beethoven's Op. 59, the Rasumovsky quartets).

The link is far from far-fetched. Both individually and as a body of work, the Shostakovich quartets do inevitably recall the only comparable body of music. And there's excellent precedent for the link generally. Before conductor Kurt Masur assumed the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic, with his longtime orchestra the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra he put together a Beethoven-Shostakovich festival for which carefully chosen orchestral works were paired (Shostakovich himself was approached for his approval, and was enthusiastic to the point of wanting to participate in the works pairings) for audiences that were initially grudging but became increasingly enthusiastic. The concerts began selling out, and the whole series had to be repeated. This was one of the many things Masur had hoped to do in New York but was told by management, "You can't do that here." The most he was allowed to do was one such program a season, which defeated the whole purpose, both artistically and commercially.

We've focused so far on Shostakovich's Fourth Quartet, a pivotal work in that it was written in the wake of his second denunciation by the Stalin regime, in 1948. One obvious effect was to leave a man of an already nervous disposition convinced, understandably, that he was a door knock away from death. Another relatively obvious effect was that he began composing almost entirely for himself, knowing how poor performance prospects were for the foreseeable future. Perhaps less obvious was a new emphasis on chamber music. He had come relatively late to the string quartet, not composing his first until 1938, when he turned 32, and the Second and Third Quartets didn't follow until 1944 and 1946. Now it seemed the perfect repository for the artistic matter of most personal importance to him, and it would remain that way until his death in 1975.

Even when he resumed composing actively in more public forms, Shostakovich maintained a careful control of the kind of content that went into them. This has led many commentators to claim that publicly he became a stooge of the Soviet regime, but this is because those commentators are morons -- either unequipped with ears or brains or for some reason not using them. Obvious examples: the "patriotic" symphonies, Nos. 11 and 12, which provide musical representations of the revolutions that preceded "the" Russian Revolution, in 1905 and 1911. "Irony" would be the wrong word, but clearly -- if you're listening carefully, more carefully than the composer expected the cultural bureaucracy would be listening -- among the subjects they consider is what sorts of popular attitudes and responses were built into those experiences.

But in the quartet, Shostakovich was limited only by his imagination. By 1956, the year of those Moldavian performances we celebrated of the then-still-banned Fourth Quartet (meanwhile he had composed a Fifth), the regime had relaxed somewhat, and in this partial thaw he composed an almost-sunny work, the Sixth Quartet, which is the first we're going to be hearing today. After that the political situation periodically worsened and improved, and the composer's own health deteriorated sharply, increasing the generally dark outlook of the quartets. Our other quartet today, the 14th (1972-73) is at once a dark and brooding but luminously beautiful piece.

THE ST. PETERSBURG QUARTET AT BARGEMUSIC
Fulton Ferry Landing, Brooklyn

Friday, February 18 • 8 pm
SHOSTAKOVICH: Quartets: No. 6, Op. 101; No. 8, Op. 110; No. 13, Op. 138
BEETHOVEN: Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 95

Saturday, February 19 • 8 pm
SHOSTAKOVICH: Quartets: No. 10, Op. 118; No. 14, Op. 142
BEETHOVEN: Quartet No. 12 in E-flat, Op. 127

Sunday, February 20 • 3 pm
SHOSTAKOVICH: Quartets: No. 11, Op. 122; No. 12, Op. 133; No. 15, Op.144
BEETHOVEN: Grosse Fuge, Op. 133

Note: Listings are of the works included on each program, not the order of performance. Ms. Aranovskaya will tell us about that at the start of each concert.

St. Petersburg Quartet: Alla Aranovskaya and Evgeny Zvonnikov, violins; Boris Vayner, viola; Leonid Shukaev, cello
[Note: First violinist Aranovskaya and cellist Shukaev have been with the quartet since its founding in 1985. The "middle positions" have turned over several times. Violist Vayner joined the quartet in 2005, second violinist Zvonnikov in 2010.]

each concert: $35 ($30 senior, $15 student)