CONCERTANTE DI CHICAGO
“Shostakovich and New Language in Soviet Music” was the title of a recent concert by Concertante di Chicago, the noted conductorless chamber orchestra. Alongside Shostakovich’s 1980 Chamber Symphony on the all-Russian program were works by Sophia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnitke, two of his artistic disciples and spiritual heirs. (The Concertante’s penchant for Russian music is understandable; its cofounder and concertmaster Hilel Kagan hails from Riga, Latvia.)
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Strictly speaking, the Chamber Symphony doesn’t belong in the Shostakovich oeuvre; it’s an arrangement by Rudolf Barshai of the String Quartet no. 8–albeit under his direction and with his approval. In 1960, still persona non grata to the Soviet regime, Shostakovich traveled to Dresden, where the sight of the city that was almost annihilated in 1944 by Allied bombers must have reminded him of the German siege of Leningrad. During the war he had written a stirring symphony (no. 7) exhorting Russians to persevere. Now he was witnessing how the war had devastated the other side. During the war he was a national hero. Now he stood alone, the victim of a campaign against him. From 1953 (and the Tenth Symphony) on, he had personalized a number of his compositions with a four-note motif–D, E-flat, C, B–based on his initials. The Eighth Quartet would be another autobiographical musing, the most obvious one yet.
More obviously a game is his Moz-Art a la Haydn, which the Concertante musicians played as an encore. The strings are divided into two camps, each headed by a solo violinist. The piece begins in darkness with 13 players improvising on fragments of Mozart’s music like so many musicians rehearsing a performance. After the houselights come on, the soloists start spiritedly bouncing Mozartean melodies among themselves–all under the “direction” of a hapless maestro (Kagan). What sounds like Mozart is quickly deconstructed into atonal clusters. The ruckus reaches its height when the players frenetically trade places and the two lead violinists (Sharon Polifrone and Alexander Belavsky) get into a duel. Finally, as one of the lead violinists retunes his strings, the lights dim. The conductor keeps flailing his arms, while his musicians flee on tiptoe–repeating the stage direction for the finale of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony (no. 45). The piece is a lighthearted burlesque–fun for musicians and listeners alike. It certainly changed my view of Schnitke as a serious-minded-only aesthete.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Stuart-Rodgers-Reilly.
