concert review: St. Lawrence Quartet
Dec. 5th, 2006 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI 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.
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.
