concert review: St. Lawrence Quartet

[calimac]

I suppose that pop music concert-goers know what to expect. Half the concert will be the latest album, the rest will be old favorites, right? Classical concert-goers know what to expect, too. Sometimes pops concerts have no previously announced program, but formal concerts always do.

Sometimes there's a change, but I'd never attended a chamber music concert where two of the three pieces were dropped - so late that there wasn't even time to print a program book insert - until Sunday. The quartet's first violinist had just become a father and was too otherwise occupied to rehearse much.

I wish I'd had a couple days notice, though. One of the quartets dropped was a Haydn I don't know well which has a lot of critical points of ensemble, and the other was late Beethoven, and I won't review a performance of a late Beethoven quartet without the score in hand: those things are formidable. So I prepared a lot, though it's not wasted because it contributed to my general education.

In place we had two works I'd not heard before, though at least I knew their composers: a string trio by the dogged Ernst von Dohnányi and a piano quartet (string trio + piano) by the irrepressable Antonín Dvořák. Kept my ears wide open during these. Usually I don't listen to other recordings of the music after the concert while working on my review, but this time I made an exception: went to the library the next morning and refreshed my memory with recordings and scores a bit.

The one piece that stayed on the program, and the one I knew well enough not to have to bother working on, was Shostakovich's Piano Quintet. I heard a rather poor performance of that in September; this was a very good performance, especially the ending which was a masterpiece of perfectly judged quiet cynicism.

Here's my published review, slightly mangled in editing (I did not say that Shotakovich's emotional evasiveness was to pass the censor, I don't take that one-note view of Shostakovich), but oh well.

Far more irksome, and with much less excuse, than the change in programming was my discovery during intermission of an article on Shostakovich in the program book (credited to the Times of London, but I can't find it on their website), which says of Volkov's Testimony, his fake Shostakovich memoirs, "Despite sustained attempts to discredit the book, no one now seriously disputes it as a truthful portrait." That's almost the opposite of the truth. Despite sustained attempts, such as displayed here, to deny the undeniable, the book is a fake, a hoax. And I think the article's author knows this and is trying to hide it, because he says "a truthful portrait" rather than "authentic." What he means is that its generally cynical view is supported by other sources. But it is to those other sources (try Elizabeth Wilson's oral history) to which we should go, not to Testimony, not a word of which can be trusted.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I thought the first page of each chapter was trustworthy...

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, those articles that Volkov copied from were probably ghost-written.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I thought I had read that Shostakovich signed off on the first page of each chapter, and it turned out he had put manuscripts before him to sign, and once he signed, he wrote new material for the rest of the chapters. So that whether DS had written the chapter or not, he had at least approved the first page of typescript.

But just in case, I went ahead and used the Three Dots Of Irony anyway.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, he signed off on them, using a neutral word indicating that he'd read them, saying nothing more. There is no indication that he agreed with their views. They'd been written for him, he signed off on them.

Indeed, since subsequent more reliable materials have confirmed that there is at least some truth behind the revisionist portrait of Shostakovich, the first thing this portrait tells us is that not a word he uttered in public can be trusted.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

As I think about it, were the articles even supposed to be autobiographical? I'm thinking back to what I read, and getting a picture of something like this:

"The fermata has been used for centuries to denote the lengthening of a note or rest. The exact value of the fermata is, of course, left to the discretion of the individual performer or conductor, but [page turn] that ass-kissing bastard Prokofiev really pissed me off when he accepted the Composer Prize from Stalin..."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Most of the quoted articles are general bland wallpaper on the meaning and significance of his works. And sometimes they do rather contradict.

I don't know exactly where the page turn in the manuscript was, but on p. 154 of Testimony, in the third paragraph of a chapter, the narrator says of writing the Leningrad Symphony, written in the besieged city in 1941, "War was all around ... I wanted to create the image of our country at war, capture it in music." And on p. 155, four paragraphs later, he says that it "had been planned before the war and consequently it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler's attack."

The next chapter begins with discussion of how much he likes the writing of Chekhov, and how modest and austere a writer he was. Then after a few paragraphs he starts talking about the caustic and bitter aspects of Chekhov's work.

See?

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

Since your review was published on-line, there is absolutely no reason why your editor cannot be prevailed upon to correct the one major misrepresentation of your views that his/her editing caused. I urge you to send him/her a re-write of the sentence(s) effected. You deserve better than that.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

In one sense it's too late, since much of the readership gets the magazine by e-mail.

We'd already been over this once in the editing process, and my instructions were either misread or disagreed with. I tried drafting a post-publication correction, but I don't want to beat up on our well-meaning but slightly inept copy editor. I'll just have to be change the way I send in corrections and be More Specific next time.