The Babi Yar symphony and Shostakovich quartets were performed in Moscow

The beginning of the capital’s musical season was marked by Dmitry Shostakovich: at the Rassvet cultural center, OpensoundOrchestra soloists began performing the composer’s string quartet cycle, and his Symphony No. 13 (Babi Yar) was performed twice under the baton of Teodor Currentzis at Zaryadye. The second of the events attracted many times more audience, not to mention the number of performers, but the first is no less important. Attended concerts Ilya Ovchinnikov.

If Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies are closely connected with the history of the country and can be perceived as a chronicle, then his 15 quartets are more like a diary, an autobiography, a conversation with oneself. At the same time, oddly enough, hearing all the symphonies that require enormous performing forces is not such a rare opportunity: in September they are performed at the Mariinsky Theater by Valery Gergiev, a couple of years ago the cycle was performed in Moscow, although with different orchestras and conductors.

All of Shostakovich’s quartets are played much less often, both in Russia and in the world; The cycle’s performance at the Salzburg Festival in 2011, where the Mandelring quartet presented it over two days, became a highlight. The initiator was Quartermaster Markus Hinterhäuser, the one who has been blamed for many years for his special predilection for Teodor Currentzis and Russian culture. By the way, last summer at the opening of the festival in Salzburg, Currentzis performed the 13th symphony. It’s difficult to say what part of the public has thought about how exactly her text might sound now, but opening a festival with it at this time is a more than significant gesture.

The poem “Babi Yar” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, dedicated to the mass executions of Kyiv Jews in 1941–1943, was published in 1961 and became a sensation in the USSR, where the topic of anti-Semitism did not formally exist. Having become acquainted with “Babi Yar,” Shostakovich decided to write a symphonic poem for a soloist, bass choir and orchestra, and soon expanded the plan, supplementing it with other poems by Yevtushenko. While rehearsals were underway, a campaign against the poet unfolded, heating up the situation around the symphony. Even the Minister of Culture called conductor Kirill Kondrashin, offering to play it without the first movement, but he refused, and the premiere took place in December 1962.

Both 60 years ago and later, the first part of the symphony, “Babi Yar” itself, attracted special attention, where Shostakovich, having moved away from direct posterity, did not avoid moves that were too direct and had a win-win effect on the public. They still work today, but the most expressive moment in the interpretation of Currentzis and his musicAeterna orchestra was the finale, where the quite straightforward lines of Yevtushenko’s “Career” alternate with one of Shostakovich’s most poignant lyrical themes. The first time it is performed by two flutes (Anna Komarova and Marianna Murzina – a magnificent work, like other solos and wind ensembles), the second by pizzicato strings, the third by a violin (Olga Volkova), whose solo melts into the chimes of celesta and harps. And if much of the symphony was done using means familiar to Shostakovich, the finale seems like a miracle that the conductor and orchestra managed to convey perfectly.

The penultimate movement also made a strong impression, not only musically; it is based on the poem “Fears,” written by Yevtushenko specifically at the request of Shostakovich. The movement opens with a long, quiet, ominous tuba solo (Ivan Svatkovsky) against a backdrop of low strings. The first stanzas are sustained in this anxious mood, touching today no less than in 1962: “It has become distant today, / It’s even strange to remember now. / Secret fear of someone’s denunciation, / Secret fear of a knock on the door.” And then – an unexpectedly cheerful march with more ambiguous words: “We were not shot down or corrupted, / And it’s not for nothing that Russia is now an enemy / Having conquered fears / Gives birth to even greater fear.” Yevtushenko himself later considered this and the adjacent stanzas so unsuccessful that he wrote new ones, even worse; The symphony was performed with them only once. But if, according to Shostakovich’s plan, the march in combination with words is intended to dispel the atmosphere in which “Fears” begins, today this is perceived at least differently.

Among the audience of the 1,500-capacity hall, there were quite a few who came to see Currentzis, but were bored by Shostakovich, despite the brilliant work of conductor and bass Alexei Tikhomirov. The capacity of the Rassvet cultural center is significantly smaller, but there were no casual listeners here. As the leader of OpensoundOrchestra, violinist Stanislav Malyshev, rightly states, “despite the fact that there are more famous and more often played quartets, there are no minor ones among them.” The cycle opened with the performance of Quartets No. 1 and No. 2, as well as Quartet No. 3 by Vissarion Shebalin, a friend of Shostakovich, a composer and teacher of enormous authority, also a victim of the “anti-formalist” campaign of 1948. His music is full of hidden, unobvious advantages, which only particularly caring performers can extract; Malyshev and his team succeeded.

Unlike the First Symphony of the 19-year-old Shostakovich, where the future master is recognized almost immediately, in the First Quartet, created 13 years later, it is more difficult to identify the author. This quartet is short – a quarter of an hour, and its extreme parts, especially the finale, are full of pure cheerfulness, rarely found in the composer. True, already the second is distinguished by its characteristic elusiveness of mood – this is how the style of Shostakovich’s quartets matures, appearing in its entirety in the Second Quartet (1944), by the way, dedicated to Shebalin. This is not so much a tragedy as a drama, the intensity of which grows throughout the entire first part. The second is a piercing monologue of the violin, the third is a gloomy waltz, full of unexpected beauty, and the finale, where a drawn-out Russian melody imperceptibly becomes a Shostakovich melody, which cannot be confused with any other. The care with which the musicians tried to convey this, and the attention of the audience, who listened to the almost forty-minute quartet without breathing, confirm: Shostakovich’s world retains its “speaking” properties and is especially needed today. The quartet cycle will continue in October, and at the end of September the Moscow Philharmonic opens a subscription to Shostakovich’s chamber music.