Commercial / Publicité
Throughout gaps between COVID shutdowns, when small performances have been doable, musicians turned with a lot ingenuity to chamber symphonies, a uncared for style halfway between a Brahms sextet and a Strauss tone poem.
Shostakovich, truly, by no means wrote a chamber symphony; however the violist and conductor Rudolf Barshai expanded a few of his string quartets for his Moscow Chamber Orchestra, and the primary piano concerto is basically conceived in miniature, for string orchestra, piano and trumpet. The extreme performances on this album occurred in a Saarbrücken studio amid full COVID precautions.
The eighth quartet opens at a sepulchral tempo, so gradual that it may solely be both inept or perverse. Because the efficiency unfolds it turns into obvious that the slowness is meant as protest, each as a mirrored image of the composer’s emotions and maybe as a response to COVID constraints.
Commercial / Publicité
Shostakovich confided in 1960 that he was writing the eighth quartet as his personal obituary since no-one else would bear in mind him after loss of life. The Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen captures his rage to perfection.
The primary quartet dates from 1938, when Shostakovich was recovering from the phobia of Stalin’s private assaults and discovering protected methods to specific his distaste for the regime. Once more, slowness achieves what harsh bowing can not convey.
The gem in between is an account of the piano concerto starring Maria Meerovitch and Sergei Nakariakov, each Russian exiles, who delve slowly between the traces to ship one thing near an prolonged psychoanalysis of the embattled composer. This can be probably the most intuitive Shostakovich I’ve heard all yr.
NL
