Sound initiative

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Thomson, Andrew

Sound initiative Shostakovich: String Quartet no.8 David Fanning Landmarks in Music since 1950 Ashgate (Aldershot, 2004); xiv, i$5pp; £35 (CD included). ISBN 0 7546 0699 6.

György Kurtág: The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza, op.j: a 'concerto 'for soprano and piano Rachel Beckles Willson Landmarks in Music since 1950 Ashgate (Aldershot, 2004); xv, 192pp; £35 (CD included). ISBN 075460809 3.

Louis Andriessen: De Staat Robert Adlington Landmarks in Music since 1950 Ashgate (Aldershot, 2004); xi, 167pp; £35 (CD included). ISBN 07546 0925 1.

THIS BRAVE NEW VENTURE from Ashgate, under the editorship of Wyndham Thomas of Bristol University, consists of three slim monographs dealing with specific compositions written in the latter half of the ioth century (more are in the pipeline). With admirable consistency of treatment, close analysis is combined with historical and social context, and where appropriate, literary discussion. The texts themselves are enhanced by extensive and clearly printed musical illustrations and, as a helpful bonus, CDs of the music come too. Undoubtedly interesting, too, is the choice of works, even if, in my view, they are of unequal value. What they do have in common are backgrounds of social upheaval, whether these be the post-Stalinist 'thaw' in the cases of Shostakovich and Kurtág, or the very different 'student revolutions' in Western Europe, in which Andriessen played a distinctive role.

I remember asking the late Hans Gál, a distinguished refugee from pre-war Vienna and carrier of the German Romantic tradition, which (if any) he considered to be the outstanding composers of the 20th century. To my intense surprise he replied: Prokofiev and Shostakovich, though with the qualification that the latter showed some signs of carelessness! Shostakovich's music is certainly not at all conventionally beautiful or appealing, and not a few critics and listeners are repelled by its banalities, raucous sonorities and obsessive rhythmic drive. Yet these rebarbative qualities surely attest to its essential truthfulness and authentic testament to the terrible historical conditions of the Stalinist era and its aftermath through which he lived and worked. During the 1962 Edinburgh Festival I was most fortunate to see him on stage after an overwhelming performance by a visiting Polish orchestra of the epic wartime Symphony no. 8 which evoked frozen caverns of terror in my teenage mind. Indeed, its composer struck me as a highly nervous, agitated owl-like figure looking completely out of place - the very opposite of a grinning Soviet People's hero like Yuri Gagarin, the Sputnik astronaut. This startling impression is substantiated by Michael Ignatieff's biography Isaiah Berlin, a life (1998):

The composer was small, shy and looked like a 'chemist from western Canada'. Whenever his minders were around, he referred to them as his dear friends, and a nervous spasm would cross his face. But at a musical evening with Poulenc at Alexandra and Hugh Trevor-Roper's, the Russian composer was transformed. [...] He performed a prelude and fugue with such passion and flair that everything they had heard by Poulenc sounded pale and polite by comparison. The haunted, persecuted expression left Shostakovich's face only during those moments when he was at the piano.

David Fanning's fine study regards Shostakovich as a survivor rather than a dissident in the Solzhenitysin mould - 'a humanist under threat', deeply ambivalent in his attitude to the Soviet regime, and prepared to speak of 'the reality and and complexity of the human condition, if necessary in the teeth of official opposition'. In a similar spirit, his contemporary Anna Akhmatova offered 'unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself, as Berlin noted after his clandestine meeting with the poetess in 1945.

But whereas she was condemned to an isolated and utterly desolate life, and latterly subjected to constant KGB harrassment, Shostakovich's international eminence compelled him - however reluctantly - to conform outwardly with the demands of the Soviet establishment. Indeed, Fanning maintains that his being coerced into joining the Communist Party severely challenged his self-image as an independent non-conformist; to this particularly traumatic event the String Quartet no.8, composed in 1960, made 'an emotionally despairing yet artistically magnificent, transcendent response'. Provocatively dedicated to 'the victims of fascism and war' this work - packed with meaningful self-quotations from the Symphonies nos.i, 5 and 8, the Piano Trio, the Cello Concerto and Lady Macbeth, together with the crucial DSCH motive - has proved tremendously effective in performance, unjustly giving rise to accusations of superficiality; that, for instance, the violent second movement and the 'dance-of-death' third movement are essentially cheap thrills. In the face of a number of other leading authorities Taruskin, Kramer and MacDonald, who contend that the music is confined by its manifest programmatic elements - Fanning argues by means of a compelling extended analysis that the quartet traces a gradual trajectory from the autobiographical through communality to the philosophical. If a solipsistic sense of deep personal and artistic frustration is suggested by the second movement Allegro molto's 'dangerously inchoate' harmonic structure and the ensuing Allegretto's unrealised potential and psychological impotence, the fourth movement Largo focuses on wider issues of imprisonment and death - citing above all the Revolutionary song Tormented by harsh captivity. In culmination, the Largo finale 'heals the rift between man and artist' by a full composition of the opening movement's unrealised fugue; significantly, its spirit of transcendence is much more in accordance with the Kantian ethos of Beethoven's late quartets than with the dialectical materialism of Marxist-Leninism.