The Power of Dmitri Shostakovich

Frankly Music returns to the Schwan Concert Hall on Monday, March 24 with a concert honoring the 50th anniversary of the monumental composer Dmitri Shostakovich‘s death. The concert is entitled DSCH! A Commemoration, and the program includes the Russian composer’s rarely-heard Trio No. 1, along with his riveting, autobiographical String Quartet No. 8.

Series founder and namesake Frank Almond will be joined by pianist Winston Choi, cellist Steven Honigberg, frequent guest violist Toby Appel and violinist Charlene Kluegel.

Almond points out the value of including Honigberg in this concert given the cellist’s long relationship with Mstislav Rostropovich when Rostropovich led the National Symphony Orchestra. Many of Shostakovich’s works incorporating cello were written with his friend Rostropovich in mind.

Almond, Choi and Honigberg will play contrasting piano trios written by Russian composers Sergei Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich at the dawn of the 20th Century. Kluegel and Appel will join Almond and Honigberg for Shostakovich’s major mid-century string quartet.

The two piano trios, each written when the composers were young, contrast the Romantic era style with an emerging Modernist era, illuminating the aesthetic divide between the older Rachmaninoff’s romantic sensibilities and the modernist vision of Shostakovich, born a generation later. As Almond notes: “It’s a concert basically of contrasts and development and trajectory in terms of Russian musical style and inevitably politics.”

Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) wrote Trio élégiaque No. 1 in G Minor in 1892 at age 18. The work was not published until 1943 after his death. The work represents what Almond describes as “the old czarist, imperial Russia… descending from Tchaikovsky. Even just the main theme is a kind of anagram of the Tchaikovsky piano concerto.”

Shostakovich (1906-1975) was 16 when he wrote his Piano Trio No. 1 in C minor in 1923. That trio was not published until the 1980s. The work already shows signs of the composer’s modernist leanings. “By the time Shostakovich is around, you can already feel the wheels coming off,” Almond notes. But it contains romantic elements, he adds, including “the opening of that trio, it’s so gorgeous, you know, but also sort of yearning and has that bit of a sentimental quality.” Inspired by the composer’s love for a woman named Tatiana, the work contains “playful, virtuosic things that perhaps symbolized aspects of their relationship,” Almond suggests.

And yet it already hints at Shostakovich’s emerging distinctive voice.

Despite being masked by subsequent achievements, these trios are substantial works. They reveal the basic framework each composer will continue, although Shostakovich left behind the romantic style and was to face a life of political and personal tensions that greatly influenced his future music. By the time of Piano Trio No. 2 (1944), one of his most well-known works, the tone had changed substantially.

His String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110 (1960) marked a capstone composition for Shostakovich.

Musicologist Kai Christiansen observes that Shostakovich described the quartet “as a eulogy for himself, an epitaph close relations called a suicide note. Vivid, dramatic, mesmerizing and devastating, this compact but dense quartet contains a lifetime of music.”

The quartet includes intact glimpses of several of Shostakovich’s other compositions including the 1st and 5th symphonies, the Second Piano Trio, the Cello Concerto, and his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Christiansen observes that they emerge “like memories floating within a stream of consciousness.”

Several of Shostakovich’s works feature a four-note theme, the DSCH motif, a musical signature derived from Shostakovich’s name in German notation. This motif serves as a unifying thread in the eighth quartet.

Not to be confused with usual juvenilia compositions, the two piano trios offer a glimpse of some of the best of Russian chamber music before the extraordinary tensions of the years that were to follow in the Soviet era and two world wars.

But Shostakovich’s 8th string quartet remains the highlight of the evening. Christiansen notes that “the music explores the complex aesthetics of the darkest aspects of human experience: sorrow, terror, violence, death, shock, grief and a sardonic gallows humor… The quartet delivers an unforgettable, epic experience.”

The concert begins at 7:00 p.m. on Monday March 24, at the Schwan Concert Hall, 8815 W. Wisconsin Ave., Wisconsin Lutheran College. Tickets are available online or at the door. Free parking is available in a parking structure west of the hall.

Frankly Music returns to the Schwan Concert Hall on May 5. Almond joins the sister duo —  cellist Ani Aznavoorian and pianist Marta Aznavoorian — with a program showcasing the birth of the composer Bedřich Smetana.