For the next episode in its International Series, the Community Arts Music Association (CAMA) will bring to town Russia’s oldest orchestra, the Petrograd (aka St. Petersburg) Philharmonic, for a concert at 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 14, in the Granada Theater.
Nikolay Alexeev will conduct, and the outstanding pianist, Garrick Ohlsson, will be the soloist in the concerted work.
The program will consist of Johannes Brahms’s “Piano Concerto No. 1 in d-minor, Opus 15, (1859)” (with Ohlsson), and Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 10 in e-minor, Opus 93 (1954).”
This is, to say the least, a heavy-duty program. We will have no doubt, at its conclusion, that we will have had a full two hours of what those who don’t listen to it like to call “classical music” — and not regret a second of it.
For many years, I resisted the Brahms as a ponderous bore, until sometime in the 1980s, when I heard a live performance by Vladimir Ashkenazi with the St. Louis Symphony conducted by Leonard Slatkin.
It was then that I had a conversion experience as dramatic, on a personal level, as that experienced by Saul of Tarsus. Since then, it has been close to my favorite orchestral work by Brahms. For all its dark, pent-up, explosive power, it is ultimately, and surprisingly, joyous.
The Adagio has a gentleness, a resigned maturity, that belies the composer’s 26 years. (Then again, since the 15-year-old Brahms made his living playing the piano in a brothel, I wonder if he can be said to have had much in the way of a normal youth.)
From it’s first publication in 1979, the book Testimony by the Russian musicologist, Solomon Volkov, has dominated our perceptions of the life and work of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75), whose autobiography Volkov claimed it to be.
The English film-maker, Tony Palmer, made it the basis for one of his awful biopics, in which the great actor Ben Kingsley, struggled manfully with a role that suited him neither physically and temperamentally.
(If you ever have the misfortune to see it, I suggest you immediately afterward watch Costa-Gavras‘s stunning film, The Confession as an antidote.) “The authenticity of the book,” notes Wikipedia, “is still very much disputed.”
The reason for Testimony‘s widespread acceptance, in what turned out to be the waning days of the first Cold War, is not far to seek.
Volkov puts into Shostakovich’s mouth everything we in the West would have him say about Stalin, the Soviet State, and those of his fellow composers (Kabalevsky, Glière, etc.) who never ran afoul of either.
All of the works discussed in the book turn out to have anti-Stalin, anti-Soviet programs. Volkov’s Shostakovich is often startlingly explicit. About the Tenth Symphony, for example, Volkov has the composer saying:
“I did depict Stalin in my next symphony, the Tenth. I wrote it right after Stalin’s death and no one has yet guessed what the symphony is about. It’s about Stalin and the Stalin years.
“The second part, the scherzo, is a musical portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking. Of course, there are many other things in it, but that’s the basis.”
Well, what we know for sure about Shostakovich is that while he was often musically brash and aggressive, he was personally shy and timid.
It is just too unlikely that he would be so lengthily and dangerously outspoken, while he was still alive, before such a notorious blabbermouth as Volkov, notebook in hand.
As Sam Spade told his interlocutors, in The Maltese Falcon:
“My guess might be good and it might be crummy, but Mrs. Spade didn’t raise any children dippy enough to make guesses in front of a D.A., an Assistant D.A., and a stenographer — are you getting all this, son, or am I going too fast for you?”
There is a slight problem with Volkov’s chronology. The composer’s letters say he worked on the Tenth from July through October, 1953, but sketches of much of the material date back to 1946.
And, the Russian pianist, Tatyana Petrovna Nikolayeva — who met Shostakovich in 1950 at a piano competition — says the Tenth Symphony was completed in 1951.
(Shostakovich was so impressed by Nikolayeva’s playing that he chose her to give the first performance of his Preludes and Fugues. In the middle of performing this work, in 1993, Nikolayeva suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died nine days later.)
None of this information is mutually contradictory, so it’s possible to construct a reasonable scenario for the writing of the Tenth without having to rely on Volkov. Thus, in 1946, Shostakovich started to sketch out his next symphony to follow the cheerful and upbeat Ninth (1945).
In 1948, however, he was officially denounced, for the second time, by the party hacks, and decided to lay low for awhile. He didn’t publish another symphonic work for five years.
Shostakovich surely kept working on the Tenth, however, and Nikolayeva’s date of completion (1951) seems about right.
He made no attempt to publish it, however, being under a cloud, and it was only after Stalin’s death in March 1953 that he took it out of the drawer and spent a few months polishing it up for a December premiere.
That leaves the question of how much of the Tenth Symphony, if any, is directly “about” Joseph Stalin, and whether it contains a “portrait” of the same. Personally, I think not very much.
As the creator of the Soviet state, and the terrifying socio-political maze through which the composer, like every other resident of the Soviet state, had to make his way, Stalin certainly had an influence on Shostakovich’s creative environment.
But to quote a very different posthumous memoir of a composer by a close friend — Anton Schindler‘s of Ludwig Beethoven: “The only thing a piece of music tells you,” Beethoven told Schindler, “is what is going on in a composer’s mind when he wrote it.”
Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, if it is “about” anything, is about Shostakovich. Testimony notwithstanding, all the musical evidence points to autobiography, rather than polemic.
Tickets to this concert are $39-$119, with special rates for seniors, students and groups. Discounted student tickets are available for $10 with valid student ID. Single tickets can be purchased from the Granada box office, 1214 State St., by phone at 899.2222, or online at www.granadasb.org.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.