Brightmusic Chamber Ensemble

Dmitri Shostakovich, Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, op. 67:   No composer better illustrates the hazards and neuroses of being an artist in Soviet Russia than Shostakovich (1906-1975).  Born 11 years before the Revolution, his life and work were defined by the emergence of the Soviet Union as a land of totalitarianism and internal terror.  He was born into a comfortable life in St. Petersburg which vanished in 1917.  He was admitted to the St. Petersburg Conservatory at age 13.  “Thin, serious, bespectacled, nervous, shy, chain-smoking, he impressed everybody with his talent” [Harold Schonberg].  His First Symphony, composed as his graduation assignment at age 19, drew immediate acclaim.  “Overnight Shostakovich became a hero of Soviet music, lauded as the first illustrious artistic child of the Revolution” [David Dubal].  For 11 years, he enjoyed government commissions and worldwide fame.  After Lenin’s death and the rise of Stalin, “the Soviet government was becoming increasingly repressive; artistic works were increasingly judged by the standards of Soviet ideology; and anything modern or dissonant was denounced as ‘formalism’” [Robert Greenberg].  Nobody quite knew what formalism was, except that it failed to synchronize with the simplicity and optimism of a Marxist world view.  Shostakovich first fell from favor in 1936.  After two years of smash hit performances, Stalin attended his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and stomped out after the first act.  Two days later, Pravda published an editorial, “Muddle Instead of Music,” unsigned but reportedly dictated by Stalin.  Shostakovich “had been hailed as the best, the youngest, and the brightest but thereafter he lived in fear” [Greenberg].  He rehabilitated himself one year later with his Fifth Symphony, but neither his life nor his music was ever quite the same.  Despite his desire to serve in World War II, his heath led Soviet authorities to relocate him to a city on the Volga River, where he composed Piano Trio No. 2 in 1943-44.  After he had started sketches, his closest friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, a musicologist and artistic director of the Leningrad Philharmonic, died of a heart attack at age 41.  Shostakovich was crushed.  His grief informs all four movements of the Trio: Movements I and III reflect deep sadness; Movement II conveys “an amazingly exact portrait” of Ivan, according to the composer’s sister; and Movement IV is a “violent, wailing, screaming danse macabre based on various Jewish melodies” [Greenberg], the composer’s first work that “noticeably alludes to Jewish music” [Wendy Lesser].  As Shostakovich was completing the Trio, Western and Soviet troops were closing in on Berlin, and discovering the horror of the Holocaust, including stories that the SS guards made victims dance beside their own graves.  The Trio can be heard not only as an elegy for his friend, but also as his “statement about the cultural destruction and desolation” wrought by the War [Greenberg].  Together with the composer’s Second String Quartet, the Trio premiered in November 1944 in Leningrad, with Shostakovich at the keyboard.  (Ironically, the work received a Stalin Prize.)  After falling out of favor a second time in 1948, Shostakovich issued a groveling public apology for his music’s departure from socialist norms.  Thereafter he struggled to survive and compose, with varying degrees of government approval.  “His chamber music probably [represents] ‘the real Shostakovich,’ the music he wanted to write, rather than the music he was allowed to write” [James Keller].   After a decade of illness and three heart attacks, he died in August 1975, celebrated as a Hero of the Soviet People.  “If Shostakovich were here with us now,” Robert Greenberg wrote, “the first thing he’d tell us was that he was no hero.  He was a survivor and a witness, his music a testament to what he saw and felt, in a world that we can hardly imagine.” 

Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Piano Trio in A Minor, op. 50:  The man (1840-1893) and his music were much the same – intensely emotional.  Tchaikovsky’s compositions were powerful and communicative, filled by a “sweet, inexhaustible, supersensuous fund of melody” [Harold Schonberg] which “made his music sound familiar on first hearing” [Robert Cummings].  Tchaikovsky the man was a tortured soul.  “He was nervous, hypochondriacal, unhappy at home, unhappy away from home, nervous in the presence of other people and terrified lest his sexuality become open knowledge....  He suffered from incessant headaches, wept easily, had constant doubts about himself and his music, and drank far too much....  He was terrified when he stood in front of an orchestra.  He got the idea that his head was going to fall from his shoulders, and he actually would put his left hand under his chin to keep it attached” [Schonberg].  But oh, the music!  Tchaikovsky was first educated at the School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg and worked as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice, but he was miserable.  At age 23, he resigned and entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory, studying under Anton Rubinstein.  When he graduated in 1866, Anton recommended him to his younger brother, Nikolai, who had founded the Moscow Conservatory and needed a harmony teacher.  Tchaikovsky lived with Nikolai for six years.  Nikolai’s fondness for Tchaikovsky didn’t stop him from refusing to premiere the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1875 and criticizing the work mercilessly, at least in Tchaikovsky’s telling.  Premiered by Hans von Bülow in Boston, the concerto was an enormous success, followed by Swan Lake in 1876, Eugene Onegin and the Violin Concerto in 1878, and the 1812 Overture in 1880.  When Nikolai Rubinstein died in March 1881, Tchaikovsky decided to write a work “to the memory of a great artist.”  Although piano trios were not common in Russian music, Nikolai had written five of them, so Tchaikovsky chose that format for his elegy.  The work is scored in two movements – the second of which is divided into Movements 2A and 2B.  The first movement is a three-melody elegy in a “free adaptation of a classic sonata form” [James Keller].  Its piano part is “unusually prominent and very difficult,” giving the work “a concerto-like, ‘Rubinsteinian’ style” [id.].  The second movement reflects “an enormous theme-and-variations structure growing out of a melody whose folk-like character would have pleased” Rubinstein [id.].  Tchaikovsky’s Trio was followed by two more great elegiac Russian trios – Rachmaninoff’s Trio Élégiaque No. 1, dedicated to Tchaikovsky (which Brightmusic will perform on March 7, 2017), and Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2, which Brightmusic also performs tonight.