Wednesday, May 3, 2006

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
String Quartets Reveal the Private Shostakovich

By Anthony Tommasini

Almost by default, the string quartet is the most intimate of musical genres, intended for performance in intimate spaces. The music is laid out in four voices, one instrument per voice, and the string instruments are all of the same sound world. Even when Haydn creates mischief in his string quartets, there is something tender and wistful about the humor. And when Bartok goes to the dark side in his quartets, the pulverized, vehement and dissonant music somehow sounds confessional.

So it’s not surprising that Shostakovich, the most inscrutable composer of the 20th century, seems at his most revealing in his 15 string quartets. Some commentators are cautious about seeing these works this way, among them Eric Bromberger, who wrote the excellent program notes for the Alexander String Quartet’s survey of the Shostakovich quartets. That five-concert series ended on Monday at the Baruch Performing Arts Center.
It can be no coincidence that Shostakovich wrote 15 symphonies and 15 string quartets. But Mr. Bromberger is correct that it oversimplifies things to see the symphonies as Shostakovich’s public statements and the quartets as his private ones. After all, there are inconsolable passages in the symphonies and episodes of genial Neo-Classicism in the quartets.

Yet given the nature of the genre, Shostakovich could not help letting his deepest feelings come out. It goes with the territory. The intimacy of the music came through with enhanced power and poignancy in the Alexander quartet’s vibrant, probing, assured and aptly volatile performances, given in an ideal hall for chamber music that seats just 174.

The confessional nature of certain Shostakovich quartets is impossible to ignore. He suppressed the Fourth, in D, and the Fifth, in B flat, written in 1949 and 1952, rightly fearing that the music was too anguished and dangerously modern at a time when the Soviet Union’s cultural police were cracking down on musical expression.

Publicly Shostakovich was forced to write paeans to the state, like the cantata “The Sun Shines Over Our Motherland.” Privately he wrote these quartets, which were not performed until after Stalin’s death in 1953. The Fifth teems with astringent harmonies, bouts of anger, obsessive repetitions and a waltz movement so long-winded and convoluted that you don’t for a moment trust its graceful pose.

Sometimes the quartets seem revealing despite themselves. The Quartet No. 6, in G, was composed in 1956, during the first month of Shostakovich’s marriage to his second wife, a captivating party official. His troubled first marriage to Nina Varzar, a physicist, ended with her death in 1954. The Sixth Quartet is sunny: the music of a middle-aged man in love with a young wife, it would seem. Yet despite its playful character, it is structurally rigorous and elusive. Did Shostakovich subliminally known better? Within three years the marriage had ended in divorce.

The renowned Eighth Quartet, in C minor, was composed in 1960, when Shostakovich went to Dresden. The city was still blighted from the devastating Allied bombing in 1945. He dedicated this powerfully bleak work “to the memory of the victims of fascism and war.”

Yet Laurel Fay, in her acclaimed biography of Shostakovich, amasses persuasive evidence that he was overcome at the time with premonitions of death and perhaps thoughts of suicide. In a letter to a friend, written days after he had finished the work, he called it an “ideologically deficient quartet that nobody needs” and described it as his own memorial. The quotations from other works in this score (the Cello Concerto No. 1 and several symphonies) seem a summing up.

Shostakovich, who was not a string player, did not compose his first quartet until 1938, when he was 32. But by his last decade (he died in 1975, at 68), the genre was at the center of his output. The last five quartets date from those years.

The Alexander String Quartet, based in San Francisco, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The first violinist, the excellent Zakarias Grafilo, joined in 2002. The other members are Frederick Lifsitz, second violinist; Paul Yarbrough, violist; and Sandy Wilson, cellist. They have recorded the works for Foghorn Classics; the first volume was recently released, the second is imminent.

On Monday night the Alexander players showed understandable signs of fatigue after their weeklong Shostakovich marathon. Occasionally their concentration slipped, notably in the tragically elegiac final work. But the chance to experience all 15 quartets played in chronological order with such intensity and engrossing commitment in a perfect chamber music hall was a privilege.

The Emerson String Quartet, whose justly praised recording of the Shostakovich quartets was released six years ago by Deutsche Grammophon, is nearing the midpoint of its five-concert survey of the 15 works at Alice Tully Hall, which, at nearly 1,100 seats, is far too big a space. Still, the Emerson players are immersed in these works, and their series remains a major event of the season.

For my part, having heard seven programs of Shostakovich quartets on seven consecutive days, far from feeling drained, I was transported.