Shostakovich & Brahms

What are you going to listen to?

Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich 's music is inextricably linked to war, to politics, to a coercive party ideology and a culture of fear that held life in an iron grip under Stalin's terror. The string quartet on this program, however, was written in a post-Stalin era when there was gradually more artistic freedom for visual artists, writers and musicians. Shostakovich could finally have previously composed works such as the Fourth Symphony or his opera Lady Macbeth, which had been banned by the regime, performed again. The pianist-composer was even able to make trips to London, Paris and the United States. Tragically, it was precisely during these years that he contracted an affliction of his right hand.

His Seventh String Quartet originated partly during the hospitalizations in which he underwent surgery on his hand. Shostakovich dedicated it to Nina, his first wife who had died unexpectedly in 1954. Fate seems to pound on the door with three repeated notes in the Allegretto. A reference to Beethoven? Or the constant fear of a visit from the secret police? In the second movement, Shostakovich turns the close-knit nature of the string quartet as an ensemble inside out by having the four muted instruments wander around like four lonely individuals in an elusive musical space. In the abrupt panic with which the Allegro breaks loose, fear and anger predominate, until the fate motif of the three notes reappears and leaves a desolate silence. In that sudden silence, a theme from the first movement blossoms, now in the form of a lovely waltz. A nice reminder of the time with his wife Nina perhaps? However, the knock on the door of fate has the Last in Shostakovich's shortest string quartet.

Brahms

Exactly a century earlier, even Johannes Brahms could not avoid references to Beethoven. The comparison with his string quartets and symphonies was so obvious that it paralyzed Brahms. With all his might, Brahms avoided writing in genres where his great countryman had set the yardstick at an impossible height. "You cannot imagine what it is like to always hear the footsteps of that giant behind you," sighed the composer. He did not complete his first quartets until after the age of 40. By his own admission, he seems to have written ... AND destroyed as many as twenty quartets before his first string quartet.

He did explore the chamber musical possibilities of the sextet in the years 1859-1860. By inserting a second cello into the ensemble, Brahms was also able to use the first cello as a lyrical melody instrument. Moreover, the rich palette of combinations of middle voices also brought the First String Sextet an enormous depth and expressiveness. Brahms frequently breaks through the dark registers with subtle modulations to major or the deployment of a light-footed Ländler, as in the first movement.

 Since May 1857, Brahms spent some time each year at the small Detmold court, where he taught, conducted the choir and played concerts, especially much chamber music, such as Schubert's Trout Quintet. In his sextet, a highlight of his late Detmold period, comparisons to Schubert's ensemble music and songs are never far away.

On a visit to Göttingen in 1858, he fell under the spell of soprano Agathe von Siebold, with whom he soon became engaged. In his later Second sextet, Brahms even hid an "Agathe motif. At the same time, Brahms had a close but never official relationship with Clara Schumann, the widow of composer Robert Schumann. Contact with both women put Brahms in a tenuous situation during these years, in which feelings of love and guilt engaged in a constant inner struggle. Many a biographer has looked for clues to the composer's emotional world in his compositions, but even in the sextet this remains speculation.

The Andante, a theme with six variations, forms the emotional and turbulent center of gravity of the sextet. Especially for Clara's birthday, Brahms also made a piano arrangement of this movement in the tradition of Baroque variation art. It gave his opponents ammunition in a fierce polemic unleashed that same year. Indeed, in 1860 Brahms wrote a letter of protest against the so-called "Neudeutsche Schule" of Liszt and his followers whose art, in his view, went against the inner spirit of music. Brahms eventually came in for more criticism than he liked, and he was soon labeled a "backward observer.

The classical forms of Scherzo and Rondo with which the sextet continues, therefore, uphold (in the best sense of the word) a rich tradition. Or as one reviewer put it, "The elegant Last movement contains all the gracefulness from Beethoven's final movements, brought into the service of a grand romantic melody that holds the heart of Schumann in its fullness - so warm and mild in tone, and here carried so nobly! We do well to honor such music and to love the genius and noblesse that brought it into being."

Frans Boendermaker

Tonight's ensemble

Pieter van Loenen violin
Diederik van Wassenaer violin
Timur Yakubov viola
JieunKim viola
Iedjevan Wees cello
Miriam Kirby cello