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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Shostakovich in
April 7, 2001
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By Anna Nisnevich
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that those who gathered in Cowell Theater on Saturday to hear the Alexander String Quartet performing Shostakovich's Fifth and Sixth Quartets witnessed two performances. One was Robert Greenberg's engaging lecture about Shostakovich, illustrated partially by the quartet. The other was the concert proper.
Greenberg's lecture was very enthusiastic, often over the top, ranging from sound-sampling of Shostakovich's symphonies to the seemingly inescapable mapping of the music onto the composer's personal life and of course (of course!) to the political situation in the totalitarian USSR. (My personal favorite was the remark about the infamous article "Muddle Instead of Music" denouncing Shostakovich as a "formalist" in 1936, that it "was dictated by Uncle Joe [that is, Stalin] himself.")
In contrast to the lecture, the Alexander Quartet's performance was very controlled, at times to the point of making the sheer discipline of the playing the most gripping aspect. It took me some time to notice how first violinist Ge-Fang Yang, uncharacteristically stationary for a quartet leader, gave visual cues to the rest of the group: Everybody seemed to know all too well what to do and when. Still, the meticulously coordinated musical phrasing, brisk articulation, and carefully planned climaxes and diffusions all seemed to miss a quality I usually find so important in Shostakovich — expressivity of sound. The quartet resorted to it almost solely in those very Shostakovichian moments of ultimate shriek.
Certainly, any lack can be turned into an advantage. And that's what happened in the concert's other "double feature" — its contrasting pair of quartets. Shostakovich's Fifth and Sixth Quartets are remarkable for being positioned, quite symbolically, at the opposite sides of an important threshold in Soviet history, the end of the Stalin era. The Fifth was written in 1952, not long before Stalin's death, while the Sixth, composed in 1956, coincided with the beginning of the political "thaw." Not surprisingly, both the program notes and Robert Greenberg's introduction cast the two works conveniently as "dark" vs. "lighthearted," as if the music were bound to reflect history by mere virtue of chronology. But the Alexander Quartet's performance seemed to highlight another kind of juxtaposition, that of a sharply delineated drama and a melancholy retrospection. The Alexanders brought out the theatricality of the Fifth Quartet by emphasizing the external contrasts among the different themes or sections, rather than the unifying melodic figure of lament diversely present in all three movements. This (dare I say) superficial approach changed my perception of the piece altogether. For me the high point of the whole program was the Fifth Quartet's middle movement (Andante/Andantino), which the quartet played with a kind of virtuosic restraint. The musicians built an ethereal landscape — spacious, yet hollow — playing (muted) with unbearable lightness. (Obtaining such a disembodied sound, ironically, entails exhausting physical labor. The struggle was often quite visible, especially in the case of the outstanding cellist, Sandy Wilson).
Likewise, the Sixth quartet, an oddity of nonconfrontational dramaturgy and perfect form, was given a new perspective by the Alexander's distanced playing. The lighthearted "honeymoon piece," as it is usually described (Shostakovich married his second wife, Margarita, a few months before the quartet's premiere), became a series of enclosed echoes invoking Haydn and Beethoven, Bach and Rimsky-Korsakov, almost uncanny in its claustrophobic outlook. This was the third concert in the Alexander Quartet's scheduled traversal of the complete Shostakovich quartets. The quality of the playing came as no surprise to me after the same group's distinguished performances of the complete Beethoven quartets. Indeed, perhaps no 20th century quartet cycle comes as close to Beethoven's achievement — in scope and in concept — as this one. The Alexander Quartet is going to repeat the first three concerts featuring the quartets nos.1 through 6 in Berkeley's Julia Morgan Theater next fall. As for the sequels — to be continued? (Anna Nisnevich is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, with an emphasis on early 20th century Russian and French music, theater, and literature.) ©2001 Anna Nisnevich, all rights reserved |
