Programme note
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1976)
Chamber Symphony No 1 in C minor, Op 110a (1960) [arr. Barshai]
Largo
Allegro molto
Allegretto
Largo
Largo
Shostakovich described his fifteen symphonies as tombstones, but he could have said the same of his fifteen string quartets. Each of these - though some of them more chillingly than others - examines mortality from a different angle, darkly, bleakly, humorously, sardonically, angrily, fearfully, with profound resignation, and by way of what may sound like morbid recollections of some of the composer’s own previous works.
Most of these elements appear or reappear in his Eighth Quartet, to be played this evening in the transcription for string orchestra by Rudolf Barshai, one of Shostakovich’s former pupils, prepared with the composer’s approval under the title of Chamber Symphony No 1 in C minor.
Written in 1960 during a visit to war-torn Dresden, the quartet was triggered - or so it seemed - by the composer’s memories of his own shattered St Petersburg. Dedicated, he said, to the Memory of Victims of Fascism, the work’s vivid portrayals of brutality and sorrow have understandably established it as the most famous of all his quartets, but repetition, not least in Barshai’s searing arrangement, has neither weakened its effect nor dimmed its message. Yet the message is not quite what it first seemed. Far from depicting the destruction of Dresden, as used to be thought, the work - like so many others of its kind by Shostakovich - is really a veiled indictment of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia.
Unlike Bartok’s quartets, Shostakovich’s were not intentionally vanguard works, though they explored territory previously uncharted in terms of pungent musical description and emotionally political comment. The composer’s own nervy presence at the centre of the Eighth Quartet is noted by his use of the DSCH motif - the initials of his own name in German transliteration, starkly represented by the notes D, E flat, C, B. This four-note signature, of a sort previously employed by Bach and Schumann, is first heard right at the start of the first movement as the melancholy basis of a slow fugal elegy.
Into this atmosphere of restrained mourning bursts the only really fast music in these five interlinked movements, a ferociously incisive portrait of mechanised inhumanity, incorporating various musical self-quotations alongside the DSCH motif. Then, as a sort of intermezzo, comes a satirical, spectral waltz, leading to the double slow movement that brings the work to a close.
These final nine-or-so minutes of almost static music, starting with a harsh, frequently repeated rat-tat-tat rhythm, form the work’s sombre climax. One of the quotations takes the form of a Russian convict song entitled Exhausted by the Hardship of Prison, along with a moving reference, high in the cellos, to the Siberian fourth act of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. In the end, the music recedes into eloquent silence.
© Conrad Wilson
