Shostakovich, Dmitri

Subterms

    Latest story

    88 Shares129 Views

    Review: When the Philharmonic Applauds the Soloist

    by

    Without interplay from the musicians, Leonidas Kavakos found tension in his own playing in Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto.After the musicians of the New York Philharmonic finished Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto on Thursday night, they did something they don’t usually do: They applauded the soloist.With a violinist on the order of Leonidas Kavakos, that reaction felt justified. He is a wonder. The music flowed out of him like a river — big, glistening and unobstructed, but also tasteful in its frictionless subtleties.Shostakovich, under the watch of Soviet authorities and brought to heel at Stalin’s pleasure, completed the concerto in 1948 but, presumably fearing retribution for failing to glorify the nation and its people, shelved it until after Stalin’s death in 1953. The work is constructed as a suite of movements. It opens with a character piece, a murkily colored Nocturne that lives in the Upside Down of Chopin’s genre-defining works for piano, and reaches a climax in a Baroque-derived Passacaglia, at once august and austere, that leads into a fiendish five-minute cadenza for the soloist.Playing from memory, Kavakos cleared one hazard after another in Shostakovich’s stupendously original score. He didn’t just spin legato lines in the searching, conversational Nocturne; he expounded entire legato paragraphs in an eloquent, unbroken stream of consciousness. Shredding his way through the Scherzo, his tone was poised, even lavish. Where some violinists convey a sense of anguish in demanding passages — playing two melodies in duet or an endless seesaw of double stops — he sounded effortless. Even his harmonics had a juicy ping.The orchestra, led by Gianandrea Noseda, faded into the background. The players failed to envelop Kavakos in the Nocturne’s glimmering, unsettling darkness. The Scherzo had no abandon, and the Burlesque’s funhouse-mirror distortions of the concerto’s once-noble themes had no derision. Noseda fitfully ratcheted up the intensity of the Passacaglia with its implacable 17-bar pattern. As energy slacked, shy deference reigned.Without interplay from the orchestra, Kavakos found tension in his own playing. In the cadenza, he could have been a caged animal reacquainting itself with its own majesty. His encore, taken from Bach’s Partita No. 1, was spellbinding.It was hard to imagine how anything could follow Kavakos’s performance, and perhaps someone at the Philharmonic felt the same way. After he left the stage, an announcement was made that the next piece, George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 1, would be pushed to after intermission.During the break, I wondered if the clean, bright acoustics of the Philharmonic’s new hall were partly to blame for the orchestra’s showing in the Shostakovich. Each instrumental section sounded crisp, soloistic and unblended.The Walker, an imaginative exercise in disparate timbres, dispelled those suspicions. The orchestra, from the pointed brasses to the curling woodwinds, found its way to unanimity of utterance.The final piece, Respighi’s “Roman Festivals,” gave the Philharmonic an opportunity to demonstrate how far it has come in calibrating its sound to the enhanced acoustics of its new auditorium. A composer of sunny bombast, Respighi provided the stirring finale for the ensemble’s first subscription program of the season in October with “Pines of Rome,” the second piece in his Roman trilogy. At the time, colors practically bounced off the walls in the lively acoustic; climaxes, perhaps overshot, took on a fuzzy quality.On Thursday, the orchestra showed off the clarity of fortissimo passages, layering percussion, brass and strings in handsome tiers. Corrosive brasses and heated strings enlivened the Respighi’s first movement, and gray-toned woodwinds, transparent violins, and luxuriant cellos and basses colored the second.In something of a redo of Shostakovich’s Burlesque, “Roman Festivals” closes with a portrait of the antic, circuslike crowds of Piazza Navona in Rome. The Philharmonic’s players came alive in the coordinated chaos. It was the sound of revelers falling into a shared rhythm — and of an orchestra relearning how to play with itself.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Review: A Shostakovich Symphony Finally Reaches the Philharmonic

      by

      The composer’s 12th, from 1961, is being played by the orchestra for the first time under the conductor Rafael Payare, also making his debut.When the stirring central tune of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 12 first emerges, a few minutes into the piece, it’s very soft in the cellos and basses. The model for this moment is clear: Very softly, in the cellos and basses, is how the “Ode to Joy” is introduced in Beethoven’s Ninth.Beethoven’s Ninth, of course, is at the center of the repertory, while Shostakovich’s 12th, “The Year 1917,” had never been played by the New York Philharmonic before Thursday, when it was a vehicle for the conductor Rafael Payare’s debut with the orchestra at David Geffen Hall.Why has this symphony been neglected? Shostakovich’s reputation in the West, even after the Cold War ended, was founded on a sense of him as a kind of dissident of the heart, his music covertly opposed to the Soviet regime he outwardly served — or at least attempted to make peace with.But it’s hard to find ambivalence or coded irony in the 12th, which tells a triumphal tale of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and is dedicated to that struggle’s hero, Lenin. It premiered in 1961, a year after its composer finally joined the Communist Party. (How willingly he joined is one of the many questions that persist, unanswerable, about his true beliefs, and so about the relationship between his music and the dangerous political situation he faced.)Unlike his 11th Symphony from a few years before, into which some read secret sympathies with the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary, there seems to be little in the 12th but positivity; even in quieter moments, blazing victory is never far away. I suppose the dark undercurrent that briefly pursues Lenin in his countryside hiding place outside St. Petersburg in the second movement could also suggest the fear Shostakovich might have felt. But here, that feels like a reach.The 12th wouldn’t, at this point, need to be disqualified from programs merely for being sincerely created propaganda — though I wouldn’t follow the program note’s glib assurance that we can forget the historical context, since “‘The Year 1917’ was over a century ago, and the Soviet Union is gone.” Tell that to the current president of Russia.It was valuable to get a chance to hear this symphony live, but it does come off a bit repetitive and thin, however wearyingly loud and dense it gets. You will not want to hear that earworm central tune again.In 40 minutes — its four movements flowing together without pause, and revolutionary songs quoted liberally throughout — the piece depicts a Petersburg (then Petrograd) simmering with chaos and tension, ready for battle; then Lenin’s retreat to plan his next move; the thunderous beginning of the revolution; and “The Dawn of Humanity,” the fortissimo, major-key utopia of Soviet life.It’s not the fault of Payare, 42, the music director of the San Diego Symphony and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, that it’s difficult to build tension in those final 10 minutes or so, which manage to be both relentless and fitful.His neat, spirited rendition of the work didn’t stint the mellower second movement, in which successive solos — the bassoonist Judith LeClair, the clarinetist Anthony McGill, the trombonist Colin Williams — advanced an atmosphere of doleful meditation. The Philharmonic seems to be steadily acclimating to its newly renovated hall, though the brasses remain extremely bright-sounding at full force, sharpened rather than golden.As the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, regularly shows, a conducting style that fits the punchy extremity of Shostakovich is not always right for Beethoven, whose Piano Concerto No. 2 was overemphatic and sluggish on Thursday, particularly in a plodding Adagio. The veteran soloist, Emanuel Ax, seemed to be searching for a middle ground between his pearly geniality and Payare’s starker phrasing, and the results sounded unsettled. Ax seemed more suavely at ease in his encore, Liszt’s arrangement of Schubert’s “Ständchen.”The concert opened with another Philharmonic premiere, William Grant Still’s brooding “Darker America” (1924), an ambiguous, 13-minute dreamscape of haziness, low-slung blues and a subdued conclusion.This was the first time the orchestra has put Still’s work on a subscription program in over 20 years, and it will be followed in March by his Symphony No. 2, “Song of a New Race.” To hear so much new to this ensemble — even Beethoven’s Second, while hardly a rarity, is probably the least played of his piano concertos — is a heartening sign of searching artistic leadership.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      The Facts and Fictions of Shostakovich’s ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’

      by

      The 1934 opera, revived this season at the Metropolitan Opera, stoked the ire of the Soviet state, or so the story goes. But archives tell a more interesting tale.Dmitri Shostakovich’s career is the most deeply politicized in Russian music history, perhaps in all music history. Arguably his most politicized composition is his alluring, macabre opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”“Lady Macbeth,” which is being revived at the Metropolitan Opera through Oct. 21, was condemned in the Soviet press in 1936, two years after its successful premiere in Leningrad. The opera was performed in that city, now called St. Petersburg, some 50 times in 1934, and it had been presented in Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia, along with Buenos Aires, London, Prague, Stockholm and Zurich. But the hammer came down. Shostakovich was censured by the Stalinist regime and feared for his career, as well as his safety.Or at least that’s how the story goes. But the archives of Moscow’s theaters tell a more interesting tale, I learned, as do fortuitously published documents from Russia’s federal archives and private holdings.“Lady Macbeth” is based on an 1865 story by Nikolai Leskov, as adapted by Shostakovich and Alexander Preys. The title character, a childless merchant’s wife, Katerina Izmailova, lives grimly in a grim burg. (Mtsensk is an actual place near the city of Oryol, known in the 19th century for its crafts. It’s not far from Moscow by Russian standards, less than four hours by train.) To escape her surroundings, and to enact vengeance on her besotted, cheating husband, Katerina takes Sergey, a laborer at a flour mill, as her lover after he sexually assaults her.When the relationship is discovered by her father-in-law, she feeds him poisoned mushrooms. And when her husband discovers his dead father, Katerina and Sergey strangle him. Katerina and Sergey are condemned to a remote penal colony. On the long trek to Siberia, Sergey takes up with another woman, Sonyetka. Katerina subsequently drowns Sonyetka and herself in the Volga River. Things could have been worse: Leskov’s story, unlike Shostakovich’s opera, includes infanticide.Svetlana Sozdateleva, left, and Brandon Jovanovich in the work’s current revival at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Evan Zimmerman/Metropolitan OperaShostakovich takes Katerina’s side in this ghastliness, pushing his opera beyond the bounds of theatrical convention to make a point about amoral responses to amorality. Lowbrow, “popular” genres represent the opera’s execrable characters. Shostakovich flagrantly abuses these genres to allegorize how most of the men in his opera treat most of the women. Katerina is assigned poignant salon arias and pensive recitatives that bear the contours of folk song. Even she, however, does not escape grotesque caricature. At the end of the first act, she describes her loneliness in a fashion that bears, at the start, elements of the Letter Scene in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” But Katerina can’t read or write, so the point of reference is skewed.Her singing increases in power, morphing from a Romantic mode to unbalanced expressionism undercut by the horrible cancan accompanying her rape. The brass section explodes, the drums attack, the strings squeal, then everything falls apart in postcoital detumescence. The “pornophony,” to quote a critic for The New York Sun who heard the music in 1935, highlights the body’s plumbing: Toilet plungers serve as trombone mutes.Opera is replete with suffering heroines, and one could argue that Katerina avenges not only what she has had to put with, but also what the heroines of the past have had to put up with, setting to rights the bad treatment of her soprano sisters. Whereas, for example, the protagonists of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Puccini’s “Tosca” achieve a state of grace through martyrdom, Katerina achieves payback. Spiritual emancipation, Shostakovich insists like a good Soviet, is a bourgeois decadent concept.That message was lost between 1934, when the opera premiered, and 1936, when it was denounced. The trouble for Shostakovich began on Dec. 26, 1935, with a production on the Bolshoi Theater’s second stage. The action unfolded in front of Katerina’s rickety wooden house, with the sloped floors and exterior staircase collapsed into a platform for the final scene. The rape was not shown, only heard. Afterward, Sergey climbed down from the window to find Boris, who beat him senseless. The music was earsplitting, the brass supplemented to fill the 2,100-seat hall.In a special, concrete-reinforced box sat Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party and self-declared opera lover. He attended a performance on Jan. 26, 1926, with Vyacheslav Molotov, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and two other aides. The din was too much for them. They left before the end.At the same time, another production of “Lady Macbeth” had long been running up the street from the Bolshoi at the Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater. This production took the name of the heroine: “Katerina Izmailova.” The staging was tightly choreographed and highly claustrophobic, defined by low ceilings, heavy furniture, handmade wallpaper, dark rugs, bricks, mortar and grime. The final scene bunched up a group of convicts in bedraggled derangement, some looking menacing, others injured and hopeless. According to the theater’s lore, Stalin was supposed to have taken in this more restrained, cerebral production, but his chauffeur took him to the Bolshoi instead, since that’s where Stalin typically heard opera.A calculated takedown of the opera in the press centered on Shostakovich’s desire to “tickle the perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences with its twitching, screeching, neurasthenic music.” via Nemirovich-Danchenko TheaterStalin relied on culture, along with the secret police and prison camps, to enforce his rule. Music let him down, however. It had become too discordant, experimental and inaccessible. At the end of 1935, Stalin authorized the establishment of an organization called the Committee on Arts Affairs. It was led by Platon Kerzhentsev, a 54-year-old career propagandist, censor and Lenin hagiographer. Kerzhentsev’s task was to correct culture, which meant correcting the top composer in the land of the Soviets: Shostakovich.On Jan. 28 and Feb. 6, 1936, Shostakovich was the subject of a pair of unsigned reviews — not editorials, as is often claimed — published in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper. One concerned “Lady Macbeth,” the other “The Bright Stream,” a ballet that Stalin had seen just before the opera. (The famous title of the first of the reviews, “Muddle Instead of Music,” was a Pravda meme, followed by a blasting of a children’s artist called “Scribbles Instead of Drawings.”)Their author was an opportunistic journalist named David Zaslavsky, a former bundist (Jewish socialist political movement member) eager to demonstrate fealty to the Party and to Stalin. Shostakovich knew him and probably found out that he had written the reviews. Zaslavsky used what he was paid for them to settle his Communist Party membership dues.When Stalin exited the Bolshoi performance of the opera in disgust, Kerzhentsev launched an arrow at his rival Alexander Shcherbakov, the first secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers. Shcherbakov had praised the original Leningrad production of “Lady Macbeth” in a letter to Stalin. Stalin redirected that letter to Kerzhentsev, whose arrow struck Shostakovich.Zaslavsky’s takedown of “Lady Macbeth” is vulgarly imaginative, centering on Shostakovich’s desire to “tickle the perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences with its twitching, screeching, neurasthenic music.” It “quacks, hoots, pants and gasps for breath in order to present the love scenes as naturalistically as possible.” And “‘love,’” Zaslavsky added, “is smeared throughout the opera in its most vulgar form.”There are no love scenes, and the circuslike music of the Act I sexual assault is musically linked to the score’s other episodes of brutality, something Zaslavsky neglected to mention in his condemnation. Nor did he mention that “bourgeois audiences” in the United States did not hear all of the panting. It was censored, and, to accommodate conservative critics like Ruth Knowles of the Clean Amusement Association of America, the boudoir scene was concealed behind a curtain.For Stalin, Zaslavsky served his intended purpose. “Yes, I remember the article in Pravda,” he told a cultural official. “It gave the correct policy.” The journal of the Union of Soviet Composers scrambled to reprint Zaslavsky’s articles and devoted several issues to shaming Shostakovich for his “leftism.”There are conflicting accounts of Shostakovich’s reaction to the scandal. Before, Bolshoi dancers remembered him playing through the score of “The Bright Stream,” laughing like a child. After, he turned up at the theater looking for his score in a panic saying he’d do “everything they want me to.” He was frightened, but he also seemed to be offended, for himself and for Russia, hurt that his art had now to be somehow like Pravda itself — that opera, ballet and the other arts had to read in black and white.Levon Atovmyan, a Composers’ Union functionary, once recalled Shostakovich leaving Moscow on the day the scandal broke to perform a concert in Arkhangelsk. The composer received a standing ovation, then headed back to Moscow, getting drunk and playing blackjack on the train. Atovmyan’s account dispels a couple of myths, one being that the opera was banned. It wasn’t. The performance Stalin saw, the fourth in the Bolshoi run, was followed by three more on Jan. 31, Feb. 4, and Feb. 10, 1936. Then the run ended.Another myth is that Shostakovich disavowed opera. “Lady Macbeth” had indeed been conceived as the first of four operas about heroic Russian women. He went back to that plan but put it aside to begin an opera based on Leo Tolstoy’s final novel, “Resurrection.” By that time, in 1940, he had composed himself out of trouble with his Fifth Symphony, which the Soviet musical establishment praised on command. Shostakovich was too valuable to the regime to be silenced.He loved “Lady Macbeth” more than anything he composed before or after it. He dedicated it to his first wife, and it was one of only two compositions that he took with him when he was evacuated out of Leningrad at the start of World War II. He revised it in 1962 under the name “Katerina Izmailova,” excising some of the ghastliness, and it returned to the Soviet stage. Not all of the changes were a response to political demands; some reflected his matured personal attitude toward the drama.“Lady Macbeth” survived a period in which culture became the very thing that its heroine so shockingly resisted: mind-numbing, repressive parochialism. In the final scene of the revised version, after Katerina hurls herself and her rival Sonyetka into the dark waters of the Volga, a convict mutters: “Oh, why is our life so dark, terrible? Are people really born for such a life?” It’s a question for the ages.Simon Morrison teaches at Princeton University. He writes about Russian music, ballet and Stevie Nicks. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Stalin Once Banned This Opera in Russia, but Audiences Still Enjoy It

      by

      “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Dmitri Shostakovich, a tale of love and betrayal once banned in Soviet Russia, is returning to the Metropolitan Opera.When Joseph Stalin gives your opera a scathing review in Pravda, history is bound to find a spot for you.Such was the case for Dmitri Shostakovich, whose “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” has certainly taken its place in the history books as a classic modern opera, but also as an infamous moment in opera history. In 1934, it was the toast of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was known then, before setting off on a tour of the Soviet Union for nearly two years. But it was turned into a reviled piece of music after Stalin, wanting to see what all the fuss was about, attended a performance in January 1936 in Moscow.The Soviet leader called it “muddle instead of music, an ugly flood of confusing sound” and “a pandemonium of creaking, shrieking and crashes” in a review attributed to him in Pravda, then the official newspaper of the Communist Party. The opera was banned for decades in the Soviet Union, and Shostakovich feared being arrested. It returned to Russian stages, in a revised version, in 1962 under Nikita S. Khrushchev (though Shostakovich’s original opera is the standard now).As “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” returns after eight years to the Metropolitan Opera on Sept. 29 (for six performances through Oct. 21), the timing feels suddenly urgent against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine. This production, which premiered in 1994, was first directed by Graham Vick, who died in 2021, with sets and costumes by Paul Brown in a vaguely 1950s setting. For some, the opera stands as testament to one composer’s patriotism, but also to his disdain for the ruling party, all wrapped up in dissonant, volatile music and a raw depiction of lust, violence and the struggle for truth and freedom.“I think every single note he wrote was about him and how he saw the world he was living in, and in that context ‘Lady Macbeth’ is an absolutely seminal work,” said the British director Tony Palmer, whose film “Testimony” in 1988 starred Ben Kingsley as Shostakovich. “Most of the Russians knew instinctively that Shostakovich spoke for them, which says a lot about the power of his music. That’s why it will always resonate, particularly at this moment.”Keri-Lynn Wilson, the conductor, leading a rehearsal. This production will be her Metropolitan Opera debut.Evan Zimmerman/Met OperaThat resonance feels particularly strong for the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who is making her Metropolitan Opera debut with this production.“The parallel right now is that Putin is trying to destroy artistic expression just as Stalin did,” Ms. Wilson said, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “This opera, to me, feels like a direct affront to that, so this is a vehicle for me to channel this incredible anger that I have toward Putin.”Ms. Wilson, who is Canadian with Ukrainian roots, for the past several months has been conducting the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which she conceived this spring, and organizing with her husband, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. They helped line up the Ukrainian musicians, as well as performance dates and funding, with the assistance of the Ukrainian government, for a tour across Europe (and in Washington and New York), so moving from that experience to “Lady Macbeth” felt like a natural segue, she said.“I have cousins who are fighting, and they are writing to me and thanking me for what I’m doing with the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra,” Ms. Wilson said. “What it is for me is the feeling of doing justice to show that we can really perform Russian music while shouting at Putin.”Anger is a theme that runs throughout “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” Based on the novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” by Nikolai Leskov, it tells the story of Katerina, a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who falls in love with a village worker named Sergei. The opera’s depiction of their affair is highly sexual, and after a couple of heat-of-the-moment murders gone wrong, the lovers are exiled to a Siberian labor camp and Sergei takes a new lover. The tragic ending, on an icy river, has some of Shostakovich’s most jarring and riveting music. It was a huge success — for a brief spell.“What a lot of people don’t realize is that there was an 18-month gap between opening night of this opera and when Stalin went to see it,” Mr. Palmer said. “There were more performances of this opera in Russia those 18 months than operas of Wagner, Puccini or Verdi.”Shostakovich in the early 1940s. He feared being arrested after “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” was banned in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.Sovfoto/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesDespite his fear of backlash after Stalin’s review, Shostakovich continued to be incredibly prolific. In 1937, he unveiled his Fifth Symphony, which was a triumph both with the Communist Party apparatchiks, who saw it as the composer honoring the roots of classical Russian music, and with the intelligentsia of Russian culture who saw it as a requiem for the Great Purge, which Stalin had unleashed the year before.“Shostakovich put everything that he defends as a human and a composer into ‘Lady Macbeth,’ but his genius is that he found a way to compromise and exist in that world after that,” said Kirill Karabits, the Ukrainian-born chief conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in England. “He wanted to remain true to himself but write in a way that satisfied the authorities.”“His music after ‘Lady Macbeth’ is different because it has so many layers,” he added. “He was hiding his criticism. Are his finales happy endings? Or are they happy endings through struggle?”Ms. Sozdateleva in rehearsal. She will make her Metropolitan Opera debut with “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”Evan Zimmerman/Met OperaFor the Russian soprano Svetlana Sozdateleva, making her Metropolitan Opera debut in a role she has sung several times in Europe, the opera stands on its own for what Shostakovich intended as an artist and a human being: the power of love and betrayal.“The most important thing for me is the theme of all-consuming powerful love and how important it was for Shostakovich to portray such deep feelings and create such a complex character,” Ms. Sozdateleva said. “What’s remarkable is that by the end of the opera, she is a murderer, but the audience is sympathetic to her.”Shostakovich’s understanding of his heroine — and his own reality in the Stalin era — plays into the opera’s rocky history, not to mention its legacy as bold art full of messages and even musical notes that are still being deciphered.“If you wrote a line of poetry that said, ‘Stalin was a bad man,’ then you were dead,” said Mr. Palmer, the director of the Shostakovich film. “But if you wrote a harsh tune that says it, it was a lot harder to prove.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      A Sister and Brother Choose Repertoire by Feeling and Listening

      by

      The young British phenoms Isata and Sheku Kanneh-Mason are performing a duo recital of cello sonatas, including by Shostakovich and Frank Bridge, at Carnegie Hall.Are Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason those rarest of things: young superstars who might actually live up to their hype?It certainly appears that way. The pair are two of seven British brothers and sisters, all musicians, who shot to fame when Sheku, a cellist, won the BBC Young Musician Award in 2016. Sheku’s exposure, in particular, has been extravagant since his star turn in the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in 2018. But listen to more than the breathless reporting of their streaming numbers and you find musicians who, while still in the early stages of their careers, already have serious, distinctive things to say.Sheku, 23, made his New York Philharmonic debut in November, playing Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, a performance that revealed him to be a “charismatic protagonist and a generous collaborator,” as Joshua Barone put it in The New York Times. Isata, 25 and a pianist, has recorded two outstanding solo albums, one filled with works by Clara Schumann, the other cleverly moving between composers including Samuel Barber, Amy Beach, George Gershwin and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.After an acclaimed appearance together at Weill Recital Hall in December 2019, they are returning for a duo recital at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday, part of a long, busy tour that continues in Boston and Atlanta before a European leg.Speaking from Kansas City, Mo., they talked about their program of cello sonatas by Frank Bridge, Britten, Shostakovich and either Khachaturian or Beethoven, depending on the stop. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.You each have your own concerns as artists, so how do you go about compiling a program when you play together on a tour like this?SHEKU The main criteria is music that we’ve heard or want to discover, that we enjoy and maybe have something to say with, and we want to spend time working on and perform many, many times. Also it’s always interesting to pick repertoire that perhaps is new to some of the audiences we perform for. The Bridge Sonata is an example: It’s music that I really love and think is special, and has been new to a lot of audiences.ISATA Sometimes when we present pieces that aren’t so well known, you have to go through the difficulty of getting presenters to accept them and trust that the audiences will like them. We’ve found on this tour that the audiences like these pieces; they really respond to the music. That just shows that all good music can be communicated, whether it’s something popular or not.Sheku, what appeals to you about Frank Bridge’s sonata, which is a rarity compared even to the Britten and Shostakovich?SHEKU It’s an incredibly beautiful and at times heartbreaking piece of music. The sonata was split in terms of when it was composed, the first movement from before World War I and the second from toward the end of the war. Bridge was certainly affected by what happened, you can hear that. The first movement ends quite peacefully, and then the second starts in a completely different world. It’s like a lament, with some dark, harsh moments as well. It ends with the first movement’s theme, and when it does it’s quite like the Elgar Cello Concerto, it’s nostalgic, almost desperate. Although it ends on a nice major chord, it doesn’t feel resolved. It’s a really fascinating piece.Did you intend the works to speak to each other, to draw connections?SHEKU The program that we constructed with Khachaturian and Shostakovich, the Bridge and Britten, there are very clear connections between the pieces: Britten and Bridge having the student-teacher relationship, Britten and Shostakovich …ISATA Through Rostropovich.SHEKU Exactly. Those connections are very strong. When I discovered the Khachaturian Sonata, it was because I was listening to an album that has Rostropovich performing the Shostakovich with Shostakovich, and the second half of the album is Rostropovich playing the Khachaturian with Khachaturian.And the Beethoven is there because some presenters think he is easier to promote than Khachaturian?SHEKU It’s great music as well, I get it.ISATA It is great music, and we were playing it before anyway. But yeah, it was originally because it’s more accessible than the Khachaturian.Are these works that you have lived with for a long time?ISATA The Bridge and the Britten we first played about a year ago. The Shostakovich we played a couple of movements of during childhood — actually we played the whole thing when we were about 18. We put it away for a few years and then came back to it.The Shostakovich was written in 1934, after the premiere of “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” but before his political denunciation in 1936. How would you describe the sonata?SHEKU He wrote it during a period of separation from his wife, but I don’t think the piece is about that necessarily. It has quite Classical elements in terms of the form of the whole sonata, the style of each movement, how the phrases are constructed, but harmonically, rhythmically and the colors he chooses to use are very distinctive of Shostakovich. The third movement is where he pours all of his heart and sorrow and soul. The outer movements are quite playful and quirky. He had a good sense of humor.This is Isata Kanneh-Mason’s favorite page in the Shostakovich Cello Sonata, from the final movement.SikorskiDo you have a favorite page in the score?ISATA I actually could pick one! It would be in the fourth movement, about six pages before the end. The music dies down, there’s this moment of silence — and then the piano explodes with these semiquavers, with an E flat minor chord in the left hand. It’s just so Shostakovich to have such a dramatic mood change. When I was younger this passage always terrified me, because I was like, Oh, I’m going to mess up the semiquavers, but now, after many years of practicing, I’m usually just excited to shock the audience with this outburst.A favorite passage from Shostakovich’s Cello SonataMstislav Rostropovich, cello; Dmitri Shostakovich, piano (Warner)You’ve both shown an interest in expanding the diversity of the music your audiences hear, whether Clara Schumann or music rooted in spirituals, but that’s not been the case with your Carnegie dates together. Is there scope for doing more of that in your chamber music programs, or is it harder in some areas than in others?ISATA There is great repertoire in the chamber music world of female composers, of Black composers, but that will come to us naturally, the way any piece of music does — through listening and through feeling compelled to play them, rather than ticking boxes.SHEKU What is potentially a shame is that a lot of the pressure to perform repertoire by female composers is placed on women, and a lot of the pressure to perform music by Black composers is placed on Black musicians. You don’t often see a white performer performing music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, for example. So us just being Black performers is, I don’t know, enough of a difference. More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Review: A Surprise Conductor Makes a Superb Debut

      by

      Dima Slobodeniouk was an excellent fill-in with the New York Philharmonic in works by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.After decades of attending orchestra concerts, I’m still impressed when a conductor is able not only to jump in on short notice, but also confidently to take on a program planned by others.Especially when — as with the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday at Alice Tully Hall — the works, though hardly rarities, are not often heard and pose technical and interpretive challenges: Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1 (“Winter Dreams”).Dima Slobodeniouk was the fill-in, making his Philharmonic debut leading a concert that had been devised by Semyon Bychkov, who withdrew a week ago. (The orchestra only said that Bychkov “will be unavailable to conduct.”)Slobodeniouk, the music director of the adventurous Galicia Symphony Orchestra in Spain and the former principal conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in Finland, arrived in New York fresh from an appearance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I’m not surprised that his Boston engagement was praised: Slobodeniouk had one of the most auspicious Philharmonic debuts of recent years, leading the orchestra in a Shostakovich concerto played with glittering brightness and a stylish, colorful and exuberant account of the Tchaikovsky.Shostakovich composed this work in 1947 and ’48, a period when his stock with the Soviet authorities who policed culture had once again plummeted. Perhaps that accounts for the elusive nature of the first movement, which he called a Nocturne: music of pensive, brooding darkness unfolding at a moderate, inexorable tempo. The violin plays an elegiac, wayward melody that seems just eloquently melancholy.The soloist, Karen Gomyo, making her Philharmonic subscription series debut, conveyed with richly warm and textured sound the ruminative quality of a lyrical line that keeps trying to take clear shape; the orchestra supported — almost comforted — her with plush, wistful chords, rich with deep strings. Yet Gomyo pressed below the surface to suggest that this music was not simply sad, but truly grief-stricken.The Scherzo comes as a complete contrast: biting and frenetic music, in breathless perpetual motion, with an intensely difficult violin part that tussles with a rattling, boisterous orchestra, especially some ornery woodwinds. A noble yet still dark Passacaglia slow movement leads to a vehement cadenza, and then a Burlesque finale. Here the bitter, almost hostile, ironic Shostakovich seems to come through in episodes of blaring fanfares and faux-triumphant marches. The orchestra captured it with brilliant sharpness, and Gomyo was extraordinary, dispatching the tangle of technical challenges with fervor and command.Tchaikovsky was 26 when he completed his “Winter Dreams” Symphony. He struggled with writing it, and later expressed mixed feelings about it. (He revised it in 1874.) But whenever I hear it, especially in a performance as good as this one, I wish I could have told Tchaikovsky to go easier on his youthful self: It’s a spirited, well-crafted and beguiling piece.Slobodeniouk found an ideal balance between breezy tranquillity and jabs of somberness in the first movement, “Daydreams of a Winter Journey.” The lovely, lyrical slow movement; the restless Scherzo, with its Mendelssohnian lightness; and the episodic Finale, which builds to a driving coda — all were splendidly performed.New York PhilharmonicThis program is repeated through Friday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More