Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 11 in F Minor, Op. 122
Shostakovich’s Eleventh String Quartet received its Leningrad premiere in May 1966 on a program that also featured Shostakovich himself at the piano, the last time he would perform in public. After the concert he collapsed and suffered a heart attack, spending the remainder of his life battling chronic ill health and polio. Having witnessed firsthand the horrors of two world wars, Shostakovich was no stranger to the issue of mortality in his music, but the subject of the Eleventh Quartet is not the composer; he had another nine years left in him, and still refused to give up cigarettes and vodka. Rather, Shostakovich wrote the Quartet in memory of Vasily Shirinsky, the late second violinist of the Beethoven Quartet, which premiered 13 of his 15 string quartets and worked closely with the composer for almost four decades.
Shirinsky’s death in 1965 marked the Quartet’s first personnel change in its then 42-year history, and Shostakovich gives voice to the gaping hole left by an empty chair by frequently pitting a lone solo instrument against the rest of the ensemble — one alone has departed, “and then there were three.” The naked, searching violin of the opening is one such example, gradually shadowed by the throbbing chorus of the remaining voices, icy, desolate, lost. The first movement bleeds into an unfeeling, robotic Scherzo, made even hollower by perfunctory glissandi passed around the ensemble. The movement flatlines on a vibrationless open string in the viola, followed by a triptych (united by a constant pulse) of raw, artless catharsis: deranged slashing at the strings, a sort of demented take on “Flight of the Bumblebee,” and a scowling, martial section upended by a maddening chirping in, significantly, the second violin. Snarling in the depths of their range, the viola and cello announce the tortured Elegy, the emotional heart of the piece. After such a profound expression of grief, the fatigued Finale presents a bleak look at life after loss. Pallid and fractured, the movement offers no resolution: the lower voices abandon the violin on its stratospheric C, and it ends alone, morendo (dying).
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival
Shostakovich’s Eleventh String Quartet received its Leningrad premiere in May 1966 on a program that also featured Shostakovich himself at the piano, the last time he would perform in public. After the concert he collapsed and suffered a heart attack, spending the remainder of his life battling chronic ill health and polio. Having witnessed firsthand the horrors of two world wars, Shostakovich was no stranger to the issue of mortality in his music, but the subject of the Eleventh Quartet is not the composer; he had another nine years left in him, and still refused to give up cigarettes and vodka. Rather, Shostakovich wrote the Quartet in memory of Vasily Shirinsky, the late second violinist of the Beethoven Quartet, which premiered 13 of his 15 string quartets and worked closely with the composer for almost four decades.
Shirinsky’s death in 1965 marked the Quartet’s first personnel change in its then 42-year history, and Shostakovich gives voice to the gaping hole left by an empty chair by frequently pitting a lone solo instrument against the rest of the ensemble — one alone has departed, “and then there were three.” The naked, searching violin of the opening is one such example, gradually shadowed by the throbbing chorus of the remaining voices, icy, desolate, lost. The first movement bleeds into an unfeeling, robotic Scherzo, made even hollower by perfunctory glissandi passed around the ensemble. The movement flatlines on a vibrationless open string in the viola, followed by a triptych (united by a constant pulse) of raw, artless catharsis: deranged slashing at the strings, a sort of demented take on “Flight of the Bumblebee,” and a scowling, martial section upended by a maddening chirping in, significantly, the second violin. Snarling in the depths of their range, the viola and cello announce the tortured Elegy, the emotional heart of the piece. After such a profound expression of grief, the fatigued Finale presents a bleak look at life after loss. Pallid and fractured, the movement offers no resolution: the lower voices abandon the violin on its stratospheric C, and it ends alone, morendo (dying).
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival