Shostakovich 5

Tonight, the Residentie Orkest will shine on the stage with a top-notch line-up of musicians performing masterpieces by Rachmaninov and Shostakovich.

What are you going to listen to?

Russians and Americans populated this concert. Ives was thoroughly American. Shostakovich's music was Russian, or rather Soviet, though that was against his will. Rachmaninov managed to unite the two in his Last piano concerto: Russian romanticism in a sometimes jazzy jacket.

Questions of the cosmos

'There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers,' a wise rabbi seems to have once said to his disciples several centuries ago. It is a statement that could perfectly apply to Ives' The unanswered question . The short composition he wrote as early as 1908 consists of three layers. The strings play very softly high, extremely tonal chords. Against this rarefied sound field, according to Ives the eternity of the cosmos, a single trumpet asks a question. Four woodwinds attempt an answer, but get no further than a few atonal harmonies. The trumpet repeats its question, but the answer becomes increasingly complex and unclear. Finally, the Last answer is an imitation of the question, which therefore remains unanswered. The cosmos, however, moves on infinitely slowly.

Jazz

When Sergei Rachmaninov fled revolution-ravaged Russia to America in 1918, he had to pull out all the stops to recover financially. Almost all of his time was filled with concerts and not much came of composing. Only in 1926 did he take up sketches for a new piano concerto that he had brought back from Russia. But the years in America had changed his style. Whereas his earlier works were of a rich romantic slant, now he turned somewhat more to the modern music of his time. His avant-garde compatriot Alezander Skriabin particularly fascinated him. But he had also embraced jazz. He was a fan of Paul Whiteman's jazz orchestra, attended the premiere of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in 1924 and regularly played jazz on the piano in his spare time for his own enjoyment. Both elements play a major role in this Piano Concerto No. 4, though the slow movement still has a lovely romantic, Russian-looking broad melody. The audience was somewhat less enthusiastic about his new musical insights. It expected the old familiar Rachmaninov with its lush nineteenth-century melodies, but was treated to a rather twentieth-century piece. Still, despite the improvements he later made to the work, this Piano Concerto No. 4 is his least played. And that is unfair, for the very fact that Rachmaninov was open to new developments in music and allowed them to influence his style shows the composer's true creativity.

Optimistic tragedy

If Rachmaninov could still escape the Russian revolution and the Soviet Union that emerged from it, Dmitri Shostakovich did not have that opportunity, simply because he was only 11 years old at the outbreak of that revolution. It marked him for life. From the beginning, the Soviet leaders completely subjected art and culture, including music, to the ideal of communism, which meant that Shostakovich was almost never able to follow his musical heart when composing. It wasn't too bad at first, but once Stalin seized power as absolute dictator in 1932, any freedom was done. Shostakovich lasted until 1936. Then things went wrong for him, too. His satirical and erotic opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk was rejected by Stalin and mercilessly reviled by the press. Shostakovich was no longer sure of his life but retaliated with his Fifth Symphony, entirely in the tough but understandable style of socialist realism propagated by those in power. Shostakovich himself, in a fit of humility, called the heroic and triumphant music "The answer of a Soviet artist to justified criticism. But the audience who attended the premiere in January 1938 and received the symphony enthusiastically knew better. Indeed, they experienced the work as an expression of the suffering the Soviet people had to endure under the yoke of Stalin's "Great Terror. Musicologist Leonid Entelis later pithily described the symphony's ambivalence as an "optimistic tragedy.

Kees Wisse