Shostakovich at Frankly Music

Monday evening, violinist Frank Almond talked about the impact of events on composer Dmitri Shostakovich as he composed his Piano Trio No. 2, which premiered in 1943. War was raging. Shostakovich was in good standing with the authorities, but had recently been in hot water. Two dear friends, one a prized student and the other a cherished mentor, had just died.

The Almond, cellist Joseph Johnson and pianist Adam Nieman then played the trio. Could we hear all that disaster in the music? Does it really refer to klezmer tunes, in honor of the Jewish protege who had died in battle?

It’s hard to say, even with Shostakovich, who is said to have hinted that his music contains secret messages of dissidence or sympathy with those who suffered from Soviet persecution.

Is the crashing and banging and the dizzying whirl of seemingly random keys in the finale a satirical picture of a nation gone mad? Or is it just good clean fun, an image of a vodka-fueled village dance spinning riotously out of control?

Hard to say. But we can that this is passionate music, that everything Shostakovich was turns up in it. But he was also proud of his craft; Monday, it was hard to read the miraculous virtuoso writing in the speedy second movement as anything other than a celebration of craft. Almond, Johnson and Neiman played it with that thrilling combination of wild abandon and utter precision that is the peculiar province of the classical virtuoso tradition. It’s a thing that makes you say wow, and people did, audibly, Monday.

The chilling, funereal third movement and the achingly fragile melody in harmonics in the first movement are moving, but are they really about anyone specific? Music has a way of defining its own form once you begin to build it. A theme yearns until it can yearn no more. Then it resolves and a new impulse begins. Even Shostakovich’s yearning theme plays out in counterpoint, which has sonic and formal prerogatives that care not for the composer’s grief.

Neiman opened this Frankly Music program with a string of very short piano works, Three Fantastic Dances and 13 of the 24 Preludes, Opus 34. You don’t analyze them or follow their argument; you take in their passing aromas and move on. Neiman said that Shostakovich wrote them more or less one a day and that he navigated the circle of fifths (C/Am, G/Em and so on, through all the keys) as Chopin had done.

Several of them sound like Chopin at his most lyrical. Others are riotous, wrong-note circus music. Some are low and dark and groaning. Neiman’s command and vivid contrasts made each of them arresting.

What do they tell us about the composer, other than he liked Chopin and heard some shaky circus bands?

Hard to say.

This program, given in the beautiful, intimate recital hall at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, will be repeated at the Conservatory at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 17. It is nearly sold out. The Wisconsin Lutheran College box office is handling tickets; 414 443-8802.