Back at Carnegie Hall today, for the fifth time, and the first since 2015, to perform Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. This will be the second time I’ve sung Russian here. Previous visits:
Each of those performances brought something different. The first two, conducted by James Levine, showed how the BSO had transformed under his conducting. The “Missa” was about frailty in the middle of the strength of that monumental score; after Kurt Masur withdrew due to progressing complications of Parkinson’s, the performance was conducted by TFC musical director John Oliver, who would step down from the chorus he founded three years later and be dead in six. The Nevsky happened the fall after JO’s retirement and at the beginning of Andris Nelson’s tenure.
The reviewers in Boston have beenkind to our earlier run of performances. Fingers crossed for tonight.
Because other things were happening, I’ve only written a little about the work that we did over the last few years, starting before COVID, to prepare the three Shostakovich symphonies to feature chorus. Symphony No. 2 was premiered by us at Tanglewood in July 2019, and received a follow-up in Symphony Hall in November of that year, accompanied by a work for choir, percussion, and flute by Galina Grigorjeva, On Leaving. It’s a tremendously moving work and one that I enjoyed more than the Shostakovich 2, if I’m honest. His early symphonies were, if we’re being kind, student works that had at their heart either a deeply ironic or deeply misguided patriotic voice.
TFC performing “On Leaving” at Symphony Hall in 2019 with percussionist Kyle Brightwell, assistant principle flute Elizabeth Klein, and tenor Matthew Anderson, James Burton conducting. Photo courtesy Hilary Scott/BSO
We were supposed to do Symphony No. 3 the following season, but I think we all know what happened in March 2020. So everything moved out by two years, and we finally sang it in the summer of 2022 at Tanglewood, initially under the baton of BSO assistant conductor Anna Rakitina, alongside Borodin’s Polivtsian Dances. We returned to the work that fall in Symphony Hall, in an unusual program that presented the work with Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and his Serenade for violin and orchestra. Number 3 is arguably a better work, but still early, and while it doesn’t feature a role for factory siren like Number 2, it still has a lot of shouted Soviet propaganda.
Shostakovich famously fell out with Stalin and ended up in a prison camp, and his compositional voice was much more cautious until the dictator’s death. Then came one of his great masterworks, the Symphony No. 13 “Babi Yar.” I’ve written a little about some of the poetry and about the overall experience of singing the work, but I’m very excited to hear it now that the disc is available.
And hey, I’m very glad to add a recording on Deutsche Grammophon to my discography!
Though I should note we aren’t done. We’re going to sing Lady Macbeth of the Mtinsk District in the new year, so I don’t get to relax my palatalized consonants just yet.
Dmitri Shostakovich & Dmitri Kabalevsky, Russian composers, with Yuri Gagarin, Russian astronaut. Photo by Tully Potter.
One moment of our Shostakovich 13 performances leapt off the page at me the first time I heard our soloist, Matthias Goerne, sing it. Toward the end of the final movement there is a complete shift in tonality as the soloist, contrasting those who knowingly perpetuate falsehoods for the sake of their career, sings:
Talent is talent, whatever name you give it. They’re forgotten, those who hurled curses, but we remember the ones who were cursed, (but we remember the ones who were cursed…) All those who strove towards the stratosphere, the doctors who died of cholera, they were following careers!
“Career,” Yevgeny Yevtushenko (trans. Andrew Huth)
Underneath the line about “strove toward the stratosphere” is an unusual chord, one that appears just one other time in the symphony, when the soloist sings about Galileo’s accomplishment at great personal risk. It’s striking and drew my attention to the passage. In the rehearsal I wrote, without thinking too much about it, Gagarin!
(Aside: this whole part of the symphony helped me frame Shostakovich’s perspectives. What I now think is that Shostakovich was a deeply idealistic person who believed in the mission of the Revolution. While he clearly fell out with the Kremlin’s implementation of the ideals of 1917, he remained committed to the idea that life could be better, and held out hope that post-Stalin Russia could make things better for the people. Or at least that’s my read on his newly hopeful tone at the end of the work.)
Shostakovich started work on the 13th sometime after the publication of Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar” in September 1961, and completed it on July 20, 1962. A few months previously, on April 12, 1961, Russia’s first cosmonaut, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, completed his one orbit of earth, becoming the first human in space. Shostakovich would certainly have known about Gagarin, so I assumed that he and Yevtushenko were writing out of a sense of well earned pride in the accomplishments of the Russian people.
What I did not know is that Gagarin and Shostakovich shared a number of other connections. As you can see by the photo at the top of the stage, the composer actually met the cosmonaut (alongside Dmitri Kabalevsky), sometime after Gagarin’s historic flight.
And Gagarin took Shostakovich into orbit with him. The story goes that—after the ground control piped in some love songs so that he would have something to listen to, after takeoff, after orbit, and after a scare where the capsule failed to successfully separate (but ultimately succeeded)—Gagarin began to sing or whistle a tune. The tune? Shostakovich’s song “The Motherland Listens,” whose first line is given in English as “the Motherland hears, the Motherland knows (where her son flies in the sky),” written in 1951 as part of his Op. 86, Four Songs to Words by Dolmatovsky for voice and piano.
So Shostakovich wrote about Gagarin striving toward the stratosphere, and Gagarin sang Shostakovich on his historic flight!
As part of the Boston Symphony’s ongoing (and almost complete) project to perform the complete symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich, I’ve been able to participate in multiple concert runs over the last few years that performed his choral symphonies, and which were recorded by Deutsche Grammophon for eventual release as part of a unique partnership that began in 2015. The first two symphonies, Shostakovich’s Second and Third, were, candidly, hard to love. Exciting and loud, but the choral parts featured a word salad of Soviet propaganda.
The Thirteenth is a different beast altogether. Written from a set of poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the subject matter touches on Soviet antisemitism, inextinguishable humor in the face of repression, the everyday hardships of Russian women seeking to provide for their families, the fear felt under Stalin’s leadership, and the sacrifice of principles in pursuit of a career. And the music is gorgeous and subtle, with multiple earworms that threaten to consume my brain.
I’ll have more to say about some of the interesting corners of the symphony, but for now I’ll just note that it’s been a remarkable journey. Reviews of our performances are in the Boston Globe (paywalled), the Boston Musical Intelligencer, and the Boston Classical Review.
I’ve written about my experience finding Black Angels before, in the year of the 30th anniversary of the release of the album. Everything about what I wrote then remains true now: the searing intensity of the performances, the indelible impression it made on my memory. But how did Kronos get into the place where they made this recording?
It starts with the title piece. David Harrington has said that a 1973 performance of George Crumb’s quartet in protest of the Vietnam War was his inspiration to found Kronos, and you can hear his love for the work in the intensity of the performance. You can also hear something else: the degree of studio engineering it took to realize the experience. “Black Angels” features amplified string instruments, a gong and other percussion instruments as well as chanting and other sounds, and the recording brings all the unusual sound to the fore and, well, beats the listener about the head and shoulder with it. It’s inescapable and haunting, and the quiet opening of the middle movement is as powerfully contemplative as anything on record. The middle movement also features the chanted “Ein, zwei, drei, veir” (here pronounced fear) and a moment of contemplative requiem performed by the lower strings, with the high strings sounding horror-movie scratches above. The final movement features the “God music” in which the quartet is joined by music from crystal glasses.
Which makes the transition into the next work, a studio version of Thomas Tallis’s 40-part motet “Spem in Alium” rearranged for overdubbed string quartet, slightly less bewildering than it appears on paper. I talked a lot with singer friends about this performance when I was in college; the concept of a string quartet playing 40 different parts from one massive score was as novel to us as, I suspect, the existence of the motet itself. (I grew up on classical radio, but even our relatively cerebral channels WGH (and subsequently WHRO) played very little repertoire that was older than Bach.)
Is the Kronos adaptation of the motet successful? I’d have to say it’s mixed. Certainly the depth of sound from the overdubbed strings is powerful, but nowhere near as impactful as a performance with choir. The studio magic that Kronos employed did not extend to creating the spatial illusion of being surrounded in a cathedral with eight vocal quintets, which is much of the “shock and awe” of the original motet. But it does powerfully convey the sense of colossal loss that seems to underlie so many of Tallis’s works, as a crypto-Catholic at the court of the King of England.
“Doom. A Sigh” is in another space entirely, but maintains the thread of lament. Here the quartet seems to play mostly ambient or electrically amplified sounds, accompanying field recordings of folk songs from Hungary made by the composer István Márta that speak of the loss of the nation’s traditions under Communist rule.
The performance on Black Angels rarely lapses into irony, which makes the one exception, Charles Ives’ “They Are There!,” all the more striking. Accompanying a recording of Ives playing and singing his own composition, the effect of the piece appears to be to skewer the patriotism of the call to war that appears in the text of the work. One interpretation is that Ives, a pacifist, could “get fightin’ mad about his pacifism.” As a teenager coming out of the Reagan years of the Cold War, I tended to interpret Ives’ performance, recorded during the height of World War II, through a heavy lens of irony, keenly aware as I was of the cost of the massive military machine that kept the state of war simmering for more than forty years. Now that we know the cost of the fascism that the troops were fighting at the time, and have seen its resurgence in the last ten years, the ironic reading feels less true for me.
The record closes with a performance of the Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8, which has been variously interpreted as being dedicated to the victims of fascism (a dedication endorsed and perhaps applied by the official Soviet regime on the quartet’s publication in 1960) and to an overwhelmed soul who contemplated suicide. The work pulls together all the threads from the other works, including threnodic passages that point back (forward?) to “Black Angels,” the requiem-like sadness of the opening movement, and an overwhelming sense of dread and loss.
The overall impact of Black Angels can be overwhelming, but it is highly recommended. After several albums of commissioned works, it earned the quartet many awards and nominations, and put Kronos firmly on the map as an essential, innovative ensemble, a reputation that the quartet would continue to re-earn through the following decade. That’s especially true with the album that we’ll review next week.
It was the summer of 1990. I had just graduated high school. I had a little pocket money, from graduation gifts and maybe from a job, though I can’t remember which one. (I had stopped working at Sam’s Comics and Collectibles several years prior. Maybe I carried on at CEBAF for one more summer.) And most importantly, my parents had given me my first CD player, an all in one CD + cassette + (rarely if ever used) radio. So I went shopping for music, at the little store at the corner of Denbigh and Warwick (Tracks? Mothers? I think it might have been both at one time or another).
Though I’m fuzzy on some of the surrounding details, I still remember the first stack that came home with me that summer, which included Branford Marsalis’ Crazy People Music and the Kronos Quartet’s Black Angels. I still can’t say what attracted me to the latter. I had probably heard someone talking about the nerve of the string quartet from San Francisco that played Hendrix and Monk, and had an ambient sound piece on one of their albums called “A Door is Ajar.” (It is exactly what you think it is.) But nothing prepared me for this.
“Black Angels” was an avant-garde composition protesting the Vietnam War, written by George Crumb in 1970 and incorporating amplification, percussion, chanting and more. It’s completely mind-blowing and I suspect that my mind never fully recovered from the initial threnody, “Electric Insects.” But it’s followed by a realization of the great 40-voice Tallis motet “Spem In Alium,” performed in overdubs; Istvan Marta’s “Doom. A Sigh,” which sets the quartet alongside two Romanian women lamenting the disappearance of their traditional village life; a quartet setting of Charles Ives’ 1942 anti-war song “They Are There” alongside the composer’s own voice; and a shattering performance of the Shostakovich Quartet no. 8.
By the time the disk finished, I was a lifelong fan of the Kronos Quartet; of avant-garde classical music; of Tallis; of Shostakovich; of the string quartet form. And of music. I think this disk was the first time I really realized the power of unfamiliar sound to pull my mind out of its normal travels.
I ripped the CD years ago and don’t play it as much any more, but this spring I found a rare LP copy on Discogs and listened to it again. It’s still as powerful 30 years later.
