The world of Russian music is a swirl of tuneful themes, melodies and expressive melancholies, as well as daunting dissonances, surges, cries, and silences. On the eve of Jan. 18, under the baton of John Storgårds, we entered this expanse through the orchestral worlds of Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff.
Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 was first written in 1948 in a Soviet Russia that created an oppressive climate for artists, demanding that art should be simple and accessible in form. Art was to be imbued with heroic sentiments that would drive the people; coloured with cheerful themes. The work is nothing like this. On the contrary, the work is pervasively dissonant, reflective, dark and depressing, although comic eruptions are glimpsed in the finale. This was certain to stir anger towards an already frowned upon and persecuted Shostakovich. Perhaps this is the reason why the work came into the public’s light only two years after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953.
The masterful violinist Guy Braunstein introduced the dark, introspective atmosphere of the first movement. The sound of muted horns slowly began to lurk in the background, which added an emotion of graveness to the now almost crying violin. The music gradually metamorphosed into a tense climax, that is dreary, yet melodious. But the climax does not come to fruition and the music relapses unto itself. We are left with an unresolved emotional disturbance and ambiguity. We suddenly enter into a folk-dance sort of music in the second movement, yet the tension is still heard, making the music in a sense hallucinatory.
The emotional character of the music collapses yet again into a mournful theme that marks the beginning of the third movement. A passacaglia in structure (in which melodies are introduced over a repeated bass line), this movement is a profound emotional statement, certainly one of the most beautiful instances in music history. The orchestra falls into silence giving way to a remarkable cadenza (a musical space in which the soloist improvises or plays a written part, usually to showcase virtuosity), which highlighted the extraordinary talent of Braunstein. In the finale, we are ushered into a sudden and swift world by the timpani where the music seems to be growing in all directions; the music is dancing, crying, laughing and screaming all the at the same time. As I said, a swirl.
The subsequent performance was Rachmaninoff’s Symphony no. 3. When I first heard this symphony, I thought it was a remarkable spectacle of romantic expressionism, as experienced through its melancholic themes. Upon entering its world again, this time live on the symphonic stage (and reading more about it), I realized the immense architecture of this symphony, the kaleidoscope of the worlds it encompasses, something I did not pay attention to previously. After the performance, Storgårds discussed the difficulty one encounters when conducting this symphony. A lot is going on, he remarked, each instrument section is developing its own independent music with a powerful drive, and it falls upon the maestro to bring all these worlds into a coherent whole. Not only this, but the symphony (written in 1935-36) incorporates elements from quite different traditions of music; impressionist, romantic and Russian modernist.
Although there can be many interpretations of the work, one pertinent theme saturates it. As The Guardian music critic Tom Service suggests, the work’s ability to realise multiple worlds of dissonance and colour, and ‘’to speak on multiple expressive levels simultaneously, to say one thing and mean another’’ is indeed a modernist idea that reflects the spirit of the time.
Perhaps this was the underlying theme that related these two works for the evening; their dissonant, nostalgic, humorous, despondent, agitated expressions, all reflected a modern era undoubtedly filled with ambiguity.
Photo provided
