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Künstler/in:
EAN:
Label:
Hyperion,DDD,2003
Zustand:
wie neu
Spieldauer:
76 Min.
Jahr:
2004
Format:
CD
Gewicht:
120 g
Beschreibung:
Album: NEU und EINGESCHWEISST (OVP). NEW and SEALED.
Shostakovich / St. Petersburg String Quartet
Release Date: 10/12/2004
Label: Hyperion Catalog #: 67158 Spars Code: DDD
Composer: Dmitri Shostakovich
Performer: Igor Uryash
Orchestra/Ensemble: St. Petersburg String Quartet, St. Petersburg String Quartet members
Number of Discs: 1
Recorded in: Stereo
Length: 1 Hours 16 Mins.
Works on This Recording
1. Quartet for Strings no 1 in C major, Op. 49 by Dmitri Shostakovich
Orchestra/Ensemble: St. Petersburg String Quartet
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1935; USSR
2. Quintet for Piano and Strings in G minor, Op. 57 by Dmitri Shostakovich
Performer: Igor Uryash (Piano)
Orchestra/Ensemble: St. Petersburg String Quartet
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1940; USSR
3. Trio for Piano and Strings no 2 in E minor, Op. 67 by Dmitri Shostakovich
Performer: Igor Uryash (Piano)
Orchestra/Ensemble: St. Petersburg String Quartet members
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1944; USSR
Notes and Editorial Reviews
The St. Petersburg Quartet concludes its complete Shostakovich cycle at the beginning with Quartet No. 1, employing rich tone and emphatic phrasing to elevate the work beyond its often simplistic-sounding, scale-based melodies. Actually, Shostakovich applied this technique in both works on this disc, but to greater effect in his later, more mature style. Igor Uryash joins the St. Petersburg for the Piano Quintet and Trio No. 2, and again the players offer fully fleshed-out sonority--listen to the sumptuous sound of the Quintet's Prelude and the Trio's Largo movements, as well as to the vibrant motion and rhythmic sparkle in the scherzo movements of both works (as well as the Quintet's finale), revealing the ensemble's stylistic affinity for the composer.
However, the St. Petersburg faces formidable competition from the Borodin Trio on Chandos, whose raw emotion and driving intensity make its renditions quite unforgettable. The St. Petersburg does have in its favor a recorded sound that's far more natural and more engaging overall, making the Hyperion disc the preferred choice for repeated listening. The inclusion of the finely rendered Quartet No. 1 further sweetens the deal.
--Victor Carr Jr, ClassicsToday.com
'Russian players have an unanswerable trump card when interpreting Russian music: self-evidently, they know what it's all about. Besides that, the exceptional quality of these musicians makes this a recording to treasure' (Classic FM Magazine)
'Igor Uryash is exemplary, striking the right balance between the demands of soloist and chamber player … Hyperion's recording is beautifully balanced and crystal clear. A very fine achievement all round' (Gramophone)
'With a superb recording to boot, this release provides an extremely fitting conclusion to the St Petersburg's excellent Shostakovich cycle' (BBC Music Magazine)
'I suspect that this performance and that of the Piano Quartet will wear well, and I'm able to recommend them to the ever-expanding legion of Shostakovich devotees who may not have followed the St Petersburg survey of string quartets' (Fanfare, USA)
Review by Blair Sanderson [-]
Strong and flexible in the quartet literature but equally powerful and adaptive in other chamber combinations, the St. Petersburg String Quartet demonstrates its versatility with pianist Igor Uriash on this 2004 disc from Hyperion. Of particular interest is the penetrating performance of the Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, where violinist Alla Aranovskaya and cellist Leonid Shukaev join Uriash in a finely coordinated reading, balancing their distinctive parts with group cohesion, and all the while presenting a coherent, unified interpretation of Shostakovich's mutable and probing score. The Piano Quintet in G minor provides an opportunity for the full quartet to display its receptivity to a fifth partner, and Uriash is evenly matched by the strings in richness of tone, emotional depth, and a genuine spirit of cooperation. Fully assured in the String Quartet No. 1 in C major, the quartet plays off the work's tension between classical poise and modernist irony, a hallmark of Shostakovich's expression in many later works. The listener may be tempted to explore the St. Petersburg's complete series of the quartets, which were released previously on separate discs. The sound quality is fine, though slightly less clear than expected from Hyperion.
Product-Information:
This disc brings to fruition the St Petersburg String Quartet's complete cycle of Shostakovich's fifteen quartets.
Composed in 1938, some thirty-six years before No 15, String Quartet No 1 appears as a simple work, composed in response to the ‘somewhat naive and bright moods associated with spring' following the birth of the composer's son and the triumphant premiere of his Symphony No 5. Yet the directness of language which characterizes all of this composer's quartets is already present, and the work is a perfectly formed masterpiece.
Pianist Igor Uryash joins the St Petersburg Quartet for the Piano Quintet of 1940; after its performance the work won for Shostakovich the Stalin Prize of 100, 000 roubles. A glance at the list of movements might lead one to imagine that this is a neoclassical work, but its direct emotional power and thematic integration place it on altogether a higher level than mere pastiche. Piano Trio No 2 (No 1 does not survive complete) was written four years later, in memory of the life of the Russian musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky. The resulting solemnity of tone is an early example of the composer's increasing preoccupation with texture and produces a work of captivating intensity.
Introduction
Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No 1, Piano Quintet and Piano Trio No 2 constitute a fascinating group of works. Within his chamber music output, they were written consecutively between 1938 and 1944, and each contains unique features: for example, a growing preoccupation with texture in the Second Trio. The very early First Piano Trio, Op 8 (1925), has not survived entirely complete.
Piano Trio No 2 in E minor Op 67 (1944)
By 1944, the year in which Shostakovich composed his Piano Trio No 2 in E minor, much had happened to the young composer and to his country. He had reacted to the momentous events of the war in the most natural way possible for him – through his music – but the death of the Russian musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky on 11 February 1944 led directly to this Piano Trio, and to a genre unusually favoured by Russian composers wishing to pen a memorial piece (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Catoire and Goldenweiser had also written ‘memorial' piano trios). The Trio was begun four days after Sollertinsky's death and completed on 13 August. The first performance was given in the Leningrad Philharmonic Hall by the composer himself with Dmitri Tziganov and Sergei Shirinsky – leader and cellist respectively of the Beethoven Quartet – at a concert on 9 November 1944; the programme also included the premiere of Shostakovich's String Quartet No 2.
The Trio is in four movements and begins, rather eerily, with a theme high on the cello in harmonics. Gradually the other instruments enter until repeated bare fifths herald the second part of the movement, with its dance-like idea. This builds to a massive climax and the movement then dies away with a simple theme, mysterious and quiet, in an atmosphere of foreboding. The following scherzo is fast and hectic, almost angry in mood, seemingly at odds with the Allegro non troppo tempo indication. In the greatest contrast the following Largo is almost static. This begins as a chaconne, with eight solemn chords on the piano. These are repeated six times in succession, the violin and cello weaving melismata above them, before several chords lead directly to the last movement. The finale is, in some ways, the most original movement of the four. Here all is nervous energy, worrying and insistent with a wry tune on the piano, later recalled to dramatic effect in the String Quartet No 8, Op 110. The movement is propelled on its way to a massive climax, after which the chaconne from the third movement reappears before the Trio as a whole peters out, a spent force, stoic and resigned, the battle over.
String Quartet No 1 in C major Op 49 (1938)
There can be few greater examples in history – Beethoven being one such – of the emergent, developmental and expressive range between a composer's first work in a genre and his last as that which exists between the first and last of Shostakovich's fifteen string quartets, dating from 1938 and 1974 respectively.
When one considers the lyrical and vernal Quartet No 1, a work so clear in utterance as to conceal the great artistry that informs its composition, and the emotionally resigned, anguished and deathly Quartet No 15, one can scarcely believe they are by the same composer. But, as with Beethoven, so vast and complete was Shostakovich's range as an artist that he was able to express the full gamut of human emotion, and do so with that rare artistic gift – the detached yet sympathetic observation of the artist, not his personal participation in the event. However different these two quartets appear, they share one characteristic which marks them out as being, again in Beethovenian fashion, typical of the composer: their directness of utterance.
As with the music of all truly great composers, the more one discovers the more there is to discover, and even in such an overtly simple piece as Shostakovich's Quartet No 1, Op 49, the artistry behind it is worthy of comment. The composer said that ‘in composing my First Quartet I visualized childhood scenes, somewhat naive and bright moods associated with spring'. The impetus for this is not hard to find: on 10 May 1938 his son Maxim had been born, and the Quartet was begun on 30 May; apart from the composer's natural personal joy in fatherhood, his Symphony No 5 had received its triumphantly successful first performance the previous November, and with that event his rehabilitation within Soviet music – after the enormous pressure following the condemnation of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936 – seemed assured. For once, this most sensitive artist appears to have been at ease with the world.
The String Quartet No 1 in C major is in four movements and begins at once with a mellifluous theme on the cello, under a counter-theme on the first violin, the other instruments providing simple C major harmony. If we think that this may be the beginning of a neoclassical movement, the composer has several surprises for us. The first is that this exposition presents subject and counter-subject at the same time; the second is that the second subject proper, given to the first violin after a long-held note, is in the key of B flat, all the more unexpected for being heralded by a repeated G on the viola (classically, one would expect the second subject to be in G); and the third is that the recapitulation adds a beat to the bar length, making the time-signature 4/4. Nor is the recapitulation at all regular; here it is more a question of feel, mood, or suggestion, rather than any literal restatement. A gentle return to 3/4 for the magical coda, in which the thematic material wafts away as soft underfeathers on a gentle breeze, ends the movement.
The second movement, Moderato, is not so much a theme with variations as a series of different settings of the same theme, which is clearly folk-based and – in great contrast to the fuller texture of much of the first movement – given at first to unaccompanied viola. There is one way in which both first and second movements are related, and that is in pulse: both are marked Moderato, crotchet = 80. Shostakovich avoids a feeling of sameness about these movements by making the first in 3/4 and the second in 4/4, as well as contrasting them in texture and key-relationships – particularly a heart-stopping modulation to E major. The varied settings of the theme in some ways, therefore, presage the great passacaglias in later works – the first time the theme appears it is ten bars in length, as in many of Shostakovich's succeeding passacaglias – but its length is maintained in proportion to the first movement, and, like the first, its ending, a gentle pizzicato resonating chord of A minor, is equally magical.
A tone colour missing from the second movement is that of muted strings, but this is reserved for the following scherzo, Allegro molto, which is muted throughout, a characteristic this movement shares with the scherzos in some of Shostakovich's later quartets. Here, the tonality is C sharp minor, and the music echoes the gossamer character of the first movement's coda in its fleet and almost understated manner, and the solo viola texture of the second subject recalls the second movement's exposition. In addition, this scherzo is in 3/4 and takes the thirds of the first movement coda a stage further, as well as alluding to the thematic material of the opening movement. Almost by stealth, therefore, Shostakovich is demonstrating a further organic unity in the work; even the gently rocking central section, in F sharp minor, derives from the cello's accompanimental figure for the first movement's second subject. The recapitulation of the scherzo shows the material in yet another light, as does the vanishing coda.
The nature of the finale is particularly interesting. The original manuscript of the Quartet is lost, but a piano score survives which originally places this movement first, and the first movement last. It is easy to see why Shostakovich reversed the order: the first movement ends quietly, which emotionally – not to say politically – would have ended this positive work on a less convincing note. The original first movement ends as if it were a finale, and as much of the material of the three movements so far discussed is so clearly related, the decision did not require much thought. The implications for this change of order, however, are that unity of material is to be further found in the finale, and that this finale carries, relatively, the most weight in the work. In the light of Shostakovich's later string quartet development, this decision was particularly significant – and doubtless, in part, instinctive.
The finale, therefore, is a sonata-style structure, akin to the sonatina form perfected by Tchaikovsky, but as with many of Shostakovich's sonata movements, his deployment of tonality is both unusual and logical. Thus, the tonal regions through which this movement moves are related to the tonic C, with E flat and C sharp minor exerting strong passing influences, while the light, main theme is firmly based on C. As the work moves to its close the music reasserts C in a sturdy passage that would not have been out of place in a late eighteenth-century score, but which is nonetheless pure Shostakovich – even in what might at first appear to be the simplest of his compositions one can discern a creative genius at work.
Piano Quintet in G minor Op 57 (1940)
The Piano Quintet in G minor was composed in 1940, following extensive work on two large-scale projects – the Sixth Symphony Op 54 and the re-orchestration of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov Op 58. The Quintet was first performed on 23 November 1940 by the Beethoven Quartet and Shostakovich himself. The composition was awarded a Stalin Prize of 100,000 roubles. A glance at the list of movements might lead one to imagine that this is a neoclassical work, but its direct emotional power and thematic integration place it on altogether a higher level than mere pastiche. The piano begins the Quintet, lento, with a solo packed with a tiny three-note cell that can be traced all through the work – this is nothing more than the first three notes of the tonic minor scale. The tone colour of the first entry of the strings is also noteworthy, for it is the cello that is heard above the other instruments. A full close leads to the poco più mosso in 3/8, beginning as a duo for piano and viola. As the other instruments gradually join in, a crescendo leads to the concluding section, lento. In the closing bars G major is touched upon, but is not firmly established as a new region in its own right.
The second movement is a four-voiced fugue beginning with a strict exposition by the muted strings in this order: violin I, violin II, cello, viola. The subject's answer is tonal, and the fugue continues with the entry of the piano, which almost paradoxically reduces the texture to two lines, reverting to four later. Towards the end of the fugue G major is again tentatively established, but this time by its first inversion – which has B as the root. This subtle point leads directly to the B major tonality of the central movement, the whirlwind Scherzo. This is the first occasion all five instruments have played together for an extended passage in the Quintet, and the central (in classical procedure, the trio) section begins as a danse macabre from first violin, taken up by the piano in high octaves. A reprise of the scherzo leads to a breathless coda.
The Intermezzo is cool and relaxed, with unhurried and essentially single-line music over a gentle walking bass. This builds into a fine and impassioned climax which dies away, finally leaving Ds separated by six octaves. At last, the deep tonal plan of this masterpiece becomes clear: D both completes the major triadic endings of the movements (G, B and now D), implying the final major mode, and is also the classical dominant of G, in which major key the Finale follows, attacca, stealing in with a gentle piano theme, itself having grown thematically from the intial germinal ideas. As the movement progresses, other ideas are recalled, and the music now smiles rather than laughs until, in the closing bars, the Quintet ends gently but swiftly in a complaisant G major.
Robert Matthew-Walker © 2004
Shostakovich / St. Petersburg String Quartet
Release Date: 10/12/2004
Label: Hyperion Catalog #: 67158 Spars Code: DDD
Composer: Dmitri Shostakovich
Performer: Igor Uryash
Orchestra/Ensemble: St. Petersburg String Quartet, St. Petersburg String Quartet members
Number of Discs: 1
Recorded in: Stereo
Length: 1 Hours 16 Mins.
Works on This Recording
1. Quartet for Strings no 1 in C major, Op. 49 by Dmitri Shostakovich
Orchestra/Ensemble: St. Petersburg String Quartet
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1935; USSR
2. Quintet for Piano and Strings in G minor, Op. 57 by Dmitri Shostakovich
Performer: Igor Uryash (Piano)
Orchestra/Ensemble: St. Petersburg String Quartet
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1940; USSR
3. Trio for Piano and Strings no 2 in E minor, Op. 67 by Dmitri Shostakovich
Performer: Igor Uryash (Piano)
Orchestra/Ensemble: St. Petersburg String Quartet members
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1944; USSR
Notes and Editorial Reviews
The St. Petersburg Quartet concludes its complete Shostakovich cycle at the beginning with Quartet No. 1, employing rich tone and emphatic phrasing to elevate the work beyond its often simplistic-sounding, scale-based melodies. Actually, Shostakovich applied this technique in both works on this disc, but to greater effect in his later, more mature style. Igor Uryash joins the St. Petersburg for the Piano Quintet and Trio No. 2, and again the players offer fully fleshed-out sonority--listen to the sumptuous sound of the Quintet's Prelude and the Trio's Largo movements, as well as to the vibrant motion and rhythmic sparkle in the scherzo movements of both works (as well as the Quintet's finale), revealing the ensemble's stylistic affinity for the composer.
However, the St. Petersburg faces formidable competition from the Borodin Trio on Chandos, whose raw emotion and driving intensity make its renditions quite unforgettable. The St. Petersburg does have in its favor a recorded sound that's far more natural and more engaging overall, making the Hyperion disc the preferred choice for repeated listening. The inclusion of the finely rendered Quartet No. 1 further sweetens the deal.
--Victor Carr Jr, ClassicsToday.com
'Russian players have an unanswerable trump card when interpreting Russian music: self-evidently, they know what it's all about. Besides that, the exceptional quality of these musicians makes this a recording to treasure' (Classic FM Magazine)
'Igor Uryash is exemplary, striking the right balance between the demands of soloist and chamber player … Hyperion's recording is beautifully balanced and crystal clear. A very fine achievement all round' (Gramophone)
'With a superb recording to boot, this release provides an extremely fitting conclusion to the St Petersburg's excellent Shostakovich cycle' (BBC Music Magazine)
'I suspect that this performance and that of the Piano Quartet will wear well, and I'm able to recommend them to the ever-expanding legion of Shostakovich devotees who may not have followed the St Petersburg survey of string quartets' (Fanfare, USA)
Review by Blair Sanderson [-]
Strong and flexible in the quartet literature but equally powerful and adaptive in other chamber combinations, the St. Petersburg String Quartet demonstrates its versatility with pianist Igor Uriash on this 2004 disc from Hyperion. Of particular interest is the penetrating performance of the Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, where violinist Alla Aranovskaya and cellist Leonid Shukaev join Uriash in a finely coordinated reading, balancing their distinctive parts with group cohesion, and all the while presenting a coherent, unified interpretation of Shostakovich's mutable and probing score. The Piano Quintet in G minor provides an opportunity for the full quartet to display its receptivity to a fifth partner, and Uriash is evenly matched by the strings in richness of tone, emotional depth, and a genuine spirit of cooperation. Fully assured in the String Quartet No. 1 in C major, the quartet plays off the work's tension between classical poise and modernist irony, a hallmark of Shostakovich's expression in many later works. The listener may be tempted to explore the St. Petersburg's complete series of the quartets, which were released previously on separate discs. The sound quality is fine, though slightly less clear than expected from Hyperion.
Product-Information:
This disc brings to fruition the St Petersburg String Quartet's complete cycle of Shostakovich's fifteen quartets.
Composed in 1938, some thirty-six years before No 15, String Quartet No 1 appears as a simple work, composed in response to the ‘somewhat naive and bright moods associated with spring' following the birth of the composer's son and the triumphant premiere of his Symphony No 5. Yet the directness of language which characterizes all of this composer's quartets is already present, and the work is a perfectly formed masterpiece.
Pianist Igor Uryash joins the St Petersburg Quartet for the Piano Quintet of 1940; after its performance the work won for Shostakovich the Stalin Prize of 100, 000 roubles. A glance at the list of movements might lead one to imagine that this is a neoclassical work, but its direct emotional power and thematic integration place it on altogether a higher level than mere pastiche. Piano Trio No 2 (No 1 does not survive complete) was written four years later, in memory of the life of the Russian musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky. The resulting solemnity of tone is an early example of the composer's increasing preoccupation with texture and produces a work of captivating intensity.
Introduction
Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No 1, Piano Quintet and Piano Trio No 2 constitute a fascinating group of works. Within his chamber music output, they were written consecutively between 1938 and 1944, and each contains unique features: for example, a growing preoccupation with texture in the Second Trio. The very early First Piano Trio, Op 8 (1925), has not survived entirely complete.
Piano Trio No 2 in E minor Op 67 (1944)
By 1944, the year in which Shostakovich composed his Piano Trio No 2 in E minor, much had happened to the young composer and to his country. He had reacted to the momentous events of the war in the most natural way possible for him – through his music – but the death of the Russian musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky on 11 February 1944 led directly to this Piano Trio, and to a genre unusually favoured by Russian composers wishing to pen a memorial piece (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Catoire and Goldenweiser had also written ‘memorial' piano trios). The Trio was begun four days after Sollertinsky's death and completed on 13 August. The first performance was given in the Leningrad Philharmonic Hall by the composer himself with Dmitri Tziganov and Sergei Shirinsky – leader and cellist respectively of the Beethoven Quartet – at a concert on 9 November 1944; the programme also included the premiere of Shostakovich's String Quartet No 2.
The Trio is in four movements and begins, rather eerily, with a theme high on the cello in harmonics. Gradually the other instruments enter until repeated bare fifths herald the second part of the movement, with its dance-like idea. This builds to a massive climax and the movement then dies away with a simple theme, mysterious and quiet, in an atmosphere of foreboding. The following scherzo is fast and hectic, almost angry in mood, seemingly at odds with the Allegro non troppo tempo indication. In the greatest contrast the following Largo is almost static. This begins as a chaconne, with eight solemn chords on the piano. These are repeated six times in succession, the violin and cello weaving melismata above them, before several chords lead directly to the last movement. The finale is, in some ways, the most original movement of the four. Here all is nervous energy, worrying and insistent with a wry tune on the piano, later recalled to dramatic effect in the String Quartet No 8, Op 110. The movement is propelled on its way to a massive climax, after which the chaconne from the third movement reappears before the Trio as a whole peters out, a spent force, stoic and resigned, the battle over.
String Quartet No 1 in C major Op 49 (1938)
There can be few greater examples in history – Beethoven being one such – of the emergent, developmental and expressive range between a composer's first work in a genre and his last as that which exists between the first and last of Shostakovich's fifteen string quartets, dating from 1938 and 1974 respectively.
When one considers the lyrical and vernal Quartet No 1, a work so clear in utterance as to conceal the great artistry that informs its composition, and the emotionally resigned, anguished and deathly Quartet No 15, one can scarcely believe they are by the same composer. But, as with Beethoven, so vast and complete was Shostakovich's range as an artist that he was able to express the full gamut of human emotion, and do so with that rare artistic gift – the detached yet sympathetic observation of the artist, not his personal participation in the event. However different these two quartets appear, they share one characteristic which marks them out as being, again in Beethovenian fashion, typical of the composer: their directness of utterance.
As with the music of all truly great composers, the more one discovers the more there is to discover, and even in such an overtly simple piece as Shostakovich's Quartet No 1, Op 49, the artistry behind it is worthy of comment. The composer said that ‘in composing my First Quartet I visualized childhood scenes, somewhat naive and bright moods associated with spring'. The impetus for this is not hard to find: on 10 May 1938 his son Maxim had been born, and the Quartet was begun on 30 May; apart from the composer's natural personal joy in fatherhood, his Symphony No 5 had received its triumphantly successful first performance the previous November, and with that event his rehabilitation within Soviet music – after the enormous pressure following the condemnation of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936 – seemed assured. For once, this most sensitive artist appears to have been at ease with the world.
The String Quartet No 1 in C major is in four movements and begins at once with a mellifluous theme on the cello, under a counter-theme on the first violin, the other instruments providing simple C major harmony. If we think that this may be the beginning of a neoclassical movement, the composer has several surprises for us. The first is that this exposition presents subject and counter-subject at the same time; the second is that the second subject proper, given to the first violin after a long-held note, is in the key of B flat, all the more unexpected for being heralded by a repeated G on the viola (classically, one would expect the second subject to be in G); and the third is that the recapitulation adds a beat to the bar length, making the time-signature 4/4. Nor is the recapitulation at all regular; here it is more a question of feel, mood, or suggestion, rather than any literal restatement. A gentle return to 3/4 for the magical coda, in which the thematic material wafts away as soft underfeathers on a gentle breeze, ends the movement.
The second movement, Moderato, is not so much a theme with variations as a series of different settings of the same theme, which is clearly folk-based and – in great contrast to the fuller texture of much of the first movement – given at first to unaccompanied viola. There is one way in which both first and second movements are related, and that is in pulse: both are marked Moderato, crotchet = 80. Shostakovich avoids a feeling of sameness about these movements by making the first in 3/4 and the second in 4/4, as well as contrasting them in texture and key-relationships – particularly a heart-stopping modulation to E major. The varied settings of the theme in some ways, therefore, presage the great passacaglias in later works – the first time the theme appears it is ten bars in length, as in many of Shostakovich's succeeding passacaglias – but its length is maintained in proportion to the first movement, and, like the first, its ending, a gentle pizzicato resonating chord of A minor, is equally magical.
A tone colour missing from the second movement is that of muted strings, but this is reserved for the following scherzo, Allegro molto, which is muted throughout, a characteristic this movement shares with the scherzos in some of Shostakovich's later quartets. Here, the tonality is C sharp minor, and the music echoes the gossamer character of the first movement's coda in its fleet and almost understated manner, and the solo viola texture of the second subject recalls the second movement's exposition. In addition, this scherzo is in 3/4 and takes the thirds of the first movement coda a stage further, as well as alluding to the thematic material of the opening movement. Almost by stealth, therefore, Shostakovich is demonstrating a further organic unity in the work; even the gently rocking central section, in F sharp minor, derives from the cello's accompanimental figure for the first movement's second subject. The recapitulation of the scherzo shows the material in yet another light, as does the vanishing coda.
The nature of the finale is particularly interesting. The original manuscript of the Quartet is lost, but a piano score survives which originally places this movement first, and the first movement last. It is easy to see why Shostakovich reversed the order: the first movement ends quietly, which emotionally – not to say politically – would have ended this positive work on a less convincing note. The original first movement ends as if it were a finale, and as much of the material of the three movements so far discussed is so clearly related, the decision did not require much thought. The implications for this change of order, however, are that unity of material is to be further found in the finale, and that this finale carries, relatively, the most weight in the work. In the light of Shostakovich's later string quartet development, this decision was particularly significant – and doubtless, in part, instinctive.
The finale, therefore, is a sonata-style structure, akin to the sonatina form perfected by Tchaikovsky, but as with many of Shostakovich's sonata movements, his deployment of tonality is both unusual and logical. Thus, the tonal regions through which this movement moves are related to the tonic C, with E flat and C sharp minor exerting strong passing influences, while the light, main theme is firmly based on C. As the work moves to its close the music reasserts C in a sturdy passage that would not have been out of place in a late eighteenth-century score, but which is nonetheless pure Shostakovich – even in what might at first appear to be the simplest of his compositions one can discern a creative genius at work.
Piano Quintet in G minor Op 57 (1940)
The Piano Quintet in G minor was composed in 1940, following extensive work on two large-scale projects – the Sixth Symphony Op 54 and the re-orchestration of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov Op 58. The Quintet was first performed on 23 November 1940 by the Beethoven Quartet and Shostakovich himself. The composition was awarded a Stalin Prize of 100,000 roubles. A glance at the list of movements might lead one to imagine that this is a neoclassical work, but its direct emotional power and thematic integration place it on altogether a higher level than mere pastiche. The piano begins the Quintet, lento, with a solo packed with a tiny three-note cell that can be traced all through the work – this is nothing more than the first three notes of the tonic minor scale. The tone colour of the first entry of the strings is also noteworthy, for it is the cello that is heard above the other instruments. A full close leads to the poco più mosso in 3/8, beginning as a duo for piano and viola. As the other instruments gradually join in, a crescendo leads to the concluding section, lento. In the closing bars G major is touched upon, but is not firmly established as a new region in its own right.
The second movement is a four-voiced fugue beginning with a strict exposition by the muted strings in this order: violin I, violin II, cello, viola. The subject's answer is tonal, and the fugue continues with the entry of the piano, which almost paradoxically reduces the texture to two lines, reverting to four later. Towards the end of the fugue G major is again tentatively established, but this time by its first inversion – which has B as the root. This subtle point leads directly to the B major tonality of the central movement, the whirlwind Scherzo. This is the first occasion all five instruments have played together for an extended passage in the Quintet, and the central (in classical procedure, the trio) section begins as a danse macabre from first violin, taken up by the piano in high octaves. A reprise of the scherzo leads to a breathless coda.
The Intermezzo is cool and relaxed, with unhurried and essentially single-line music over a gentle walking bass. This builds into a fine and impassioned climax which dies away, finally leaving Ds separated by six octaves. At last, the deep tonal plan of this masterpiece becomes clear: D both completes the major triadic endings of the movements (G, B and now D), implying the final major mode, and is also the classical dominant of G, in which major key the Finale follows, attacca, stealing in with a gentle piano theme, itself having grown thematically from the intial germinal ideas. As the movement progresses, other ideas are recalled, and the music now smiles rather than laughs until, in the closing bars, the Quintet ends gently but swiftly in a complaisant G major.
Robert Matthew-Walker © 2004
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