Sunday Classics preview: What did it take to get a string quartet banned in Soviet Russia? Meet Shostakovich's 4th

The final two and a half minutes of the Shostakovich Fourth Quartet (1949), played by the Emerson Quartet

The final pianissimo, like a last sigh, flew off into the hall and returned to us a barely audible echo. We tried to prolong the silence, but the audience interfered. Destroying the fragile world of brief truth, uncertain applause broke out in the hall. We rose slowly, bowed to Shostakovich, and left the stage. The applause died without gaining strength.

-- Rostislav Dubinsky, first violinist of the original
Borodin Quartet, about a performance of the
Shostakovich Fourth Quartet in Moldavia, 1956

by Ken

The simple answer to the question I've posed in the post heading above is, in the case of Shostakovich's Quartet No. 4, a ringing blanket denunciation of the composer

Next weekend, February 18-20 (Friday and Saturday nights at 8, Sunday afternoon at 3), New Yorkers have access to a musical event of almost impossible-to-overstate importance: the second and concluding round of three concerts by the St. Petersburg String Quartet presenting all 15 of the string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich, paired with a middle or late Beethoven quartet on each program. The first three concerts took place a couple of weeks ago. It takes a lot to get me to shell out $35 for a concert (it's only $30 for seniors, and $15 for students), and for me to do it twice in one weekend is almost unheard of. At that, I'm kind of sorry I missed the opening concert on the Friday night. What got me schlepping to Brooklyn in particularly frigid January weather, to Bargemusic's barge in the East River at the Fulton Ferry Landing, was the realization that $35 is actually a bargain when you're talking about:

* programs packing this much music of this much quality,

* performed by what may be the finest string quartet before the public today,

* playing in such an intimate space.

We'll be talking more about the remaining programs in tomorrow night's preview and Sunday's main post. Meanwhile, here's the Bargemusic schedule. You can phone or e-mail for reservations, but all actual ticket-buying is done at the door before each concert.

On Sunday we're going to preview two of the Shostakovich quartets still to come in the St. Petersburg series, No. 6 (Friday night the 18th) and No. 14 (Saturday night the 19th). In the previews, perhaps perversely, we're going to concern ourselves with one that's already been played, No. 4. It's still not one of the best-known or -loved of the Shostakovich quartets, but it seems to me a splendidly "typical" specimen of "the 15," written at one of the darkest moments of the composer's life: in the wake of his second full-scale denunciation by the Stalinist regime, in 1948. It wasn't performed publicly until December 1953, eight months after Stalin's death, and even then it was banned from performance for several more years.

In our previews, we're honoring an early performance of the Shostakovich Fourth Quartet, or rather two performances -- one public and formal, the other neither of these things -- on the same night, in the culturally remote Soviet precinct of Moldavia, in 1956.


FOR MORE ON THAT STRANGE NIGHT IN 1956, AND
TO HEAR THE WHOLE FOURTH QUARTET, CLICK HERE.

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