Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Cries and Whispers

Watching the brilliant Alexander Quartet perform Shostakovich Quartets 7, 8 and 9 in a jewel box recital room at the Baruch Performing Arts Center reminded me of what is often missing in chamber music--the chamber. Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center is the default mainstream residence of chamber music in New York but it holds more than 1,100 people and has the most generous ailses in town. The Engleman Recital Hall seats 172 and doubles as a classroom.

We sat in the fourth row, level with the stage, about 20 feet from the players. From that distance, in the hands of musicians playing with skill and conviction, the immediacy of Shostakovich's pain is almost unbearable, especially in the heartwrenching Eighth, which sounds exactly like what it may have been--a unfulfilled suicide note of a great composer and miserable human being.

The official version of the quartet's provenance is that Shostakovich was reacting to a visit to Dresden(where he was supposed to be writing music for a film) which still showed the scars from the World War II bombing. The alternative version is that he had just been forced to join the Communist Party and was so distraught he was contemplating suicide.

In Shostakovich: A Life, Laurel Fay quotes a letter that Shostakovich wrote to a friend five days after completing the quartet: "However much I tried to draft my obligations to the film, I just couldn't do it. Instead, I wrote an ideologically deficient quartet nobody needs. I reflected that if I die some day then it's hardly likely anyone will write a work dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write one myself. You could even write on the cover: 'Dedicated to the memory of the composer of this quartet.'"

Whether Shostakovich had really reached the ultimate point of despair is unknowable but the Eighth speaks for itself. Opening quietly with the signature D-Eb-C-B (DSCH), the quartet quotes from at least a half dozen other Shostakovich pieces as it works its way from resignaton to fury to despair and back to resignation. The inexplicably obscure Alexander players, whose skill and understanding of these works is easily the equal of the much more famous Shostakovich interpreters--the Emerson Quartet--peel back the layers of despair note by note and reveal a soul in naked torment.

It is an unspeakly bleak and deeply personal work that is so intimate it makes you feel as though you're watching something you shouldn't--like someone who has just been told that the person they loved most in the world has died. You want to turn away but the pain freezes you in place. I have heard this piece hundreds of times live, and in recordings, but I never felt it as intensely as I did last night. Intimate music touches the heart in intimate places.

posted by Jerry Bowles 4/29/2006