"Après nous, le déluge."
That was how I started my Time Out preview of Anne-Marie McDermott's latest project, a three-concert cycle of most of Dmitri Shostakovich's chamber music (apart from the string quartets) at Alice Tully Hall, which concluded this evening. The series was presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. And while Louis XV's (or Madame Pompadour's, depending on who you consult) prognostication about the course of post-monarchy French politics has nothing whatsoever to do with a Shostakovich cycle, the phrase appealed to me simply because next year is the composer's centenary, which will bring traversals of the symphonies (by Valery Gergiev leading two orchestras) and quartets (by the Emersons) to Lincoln Center... a welcome déluge indeed, especially compared to the ones with which we've sadly been most preoccupied this year.
Since I missed the first two concerts in the series, I was happy to read Bernard Holland's review of those gigs in The New York Times today. Sadly, however, the Times wasn't in the house tonight for the third concert, which I'd pegged in advance as perhaps the most unmissable.
One incentive, I must admit, had nothing to do with Shostakovich. Tonight's bill included the late-period composition Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok, sung by Lauren Skuce. I fell hard for this singer a couple of seasons back when, sharing a stage with the likes of Christine Goerke and Katharine Goeldner, Skuce stole scene after scene as Morgana in New York City Opera's Alcina. (My exact words were, "I'd crawl barelegged across a mile of gravel just to hear her read the phone book.")
Since then, I've sadly missed a Symphony Space recital and two subsequent appearances at the Bard Festival (the first devoted to Shostakovich, the next to Copland). That's probably why I had a hard time imagining how Handel's flirty sprite might take on heavy weather Shostakovich originally concocted for Galina Vishnevskaya.
Altogether admirably, it turned out. Accompanied by violinist Ida Kavafian, cellist Fred Sherry and McDermott, Skuce dug into Blok's severe texts with a deep gravitas and a weightier sound than had been on offer in Alcina. Matter of fact, she shook the bloody walls in "Gamajun ptica veshchaja." I'm not qualified to speak to the precision of Skuce's Russian diction -- would that friend and TONY contributor David Shengold had been with me -- but from my perspective, every nuance she delivered seemed to be precisely what both poet and composer called for.
What's more, the way those verses played across Skuce's face as she prepared herself for each line rang true over and over again -- not as merely cheap play-acting, but as genuine immersion in the essential qualities required by text and music. The instrumentalists matched her move for move in this flinty score, the final three-song sequence proving especially powerful.
The Blok songs were preceded by music I didn't previously know (the Op. 94 Concertino, composed for son Maxim, and Op. 6 Suite for Two Pianos) and music I knew in other forms (arrangements of pieces from the Jazz Suite No. 1 and film scores Song of the Great Rivers and The Gadfly). The Concertino was Shostakovich in celebratory mode, a lot like the Festive Overture that practically every high-school or college musician has played at one time or another; the Suite, an accomplished student work, touched on modes familiar from works by Liszt, Brahms and Debussy, when not deviating into chord progressions that wouldn't sound unfamiliar to fans of '70s AM-radio pop. The Gadfly tarantella threatened to fly off the rails... but then, that is the point of a tarantella, isn't it? Despite dramatically different physical approaches -- McDermott lets the music play across her in head-shake, furrowed brow and radiant grin, while Schub is altogether more circumspect -- the two proved an ideal match, rendering the music with tremendous verve and welcome playfulness.
Following the break, McDermott and Paul Neubauer played Shostakovich's Viola Sonata, from 1975, the year he died. Although a cell phone and an audience member seized with an eruptive cough marred the final bars of the first movement, the piece worked its particular spell -- which was probably far more uncomfortable than any disturbance, since this music was the last that Shostakovich would create and what's more, he apparently knew it. The aphoristic first movement doesn't really broadcast that fact, and initially I found Neubauer wanting for heavier grit. He brought it on in the second movement's sardonic march, a last look back at the composer's flaming youth.
The third movement is without question one of this world's Great Things. And yet, when performed as effectively as it was here, the music also makes you feel like an utter interloper. To be blunt, this is the sound of a man resigning himself to death. The movement rings with allusions to Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata (and how close some of those phrases are to the familar "Funeral March" I'd never quite sussed before). We hear Shostakovich struggle, attempt to summon strength from earlier bravado, then give in to the inevitable, all in a minor key.
A shift to the major and a slowly swaying cradle-song finale, and suddenly we're trespassing on the most private moment of all: Shostakovich makes peace with his impending departure, and just maybe shares a glimpse of what lies beyond. (The composer finished the piece on July 5, 1975, and died exactly one month later; the first performance took place in his home September 25, on what would have been his 69th birthday.)
Your mileage may vary, but I find this one of the more painfully intimate passages I've ever heard. Depending on your perspective, it can feel reassuring and affirmative, or it can feel like utter trespass. My pendulum swung toward the latter tonight -- I felt gutted, not to mention pretty hostile towards those who leapt from their seats and made for the doors the nanosecond the concert/experience/ordeal ended.
Crawling from the wreckage, I felt like there were two listening options for the rest of the evening: the "Moonlight" Sonata or nothing at all. As it happens, I chose option "C," Stefan Wolpe's String Quartet. But that's a post for another time. In the here and now, congratulations to Anne-Marie McDermott and her colleagues for an outstanding experience on a lot of different levels.
(While I'm in grateful mode, thanks to Steve Hicken, Franz Fuchs and everyone else who's made my landing in the Blogosphere so extremely comfortable. And yo, Greg Sandow's finally gotten his book fired up, so get yourself over here in a hurry.)
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