It’s not often you get to go to a chamber music concert of entirely unfamiliar pieces and have them all turn out to be good. But I had that experience last Saturday night at Music@Menlo’s “St. Petersburg” concert. The program even included two Shostakovich pieces I had never heard before—and that’s after writing a book about Shostakovich! One of them, granted, was the 1931 Impromptu for Viola and Piano, a two-minute piece that has been lost practically since its first appearance; but the other was the powerful “From Jewish Folk Poetry,” a 1948 composition which I had read about and never heard.
I’m getting ahead of myself, though. The program started with a trio by Glinka written in 1832 and composed for piano, clarinet, and bassoon. It was lively and fun, but the most striking thing was how it foreshadowed in odd ways the jazz trios of the twentieth century. Next up came what I think might have been my favorite work of the evening: Anton Arensky’s Quartet No. 2 for violin, viola, and two cellos, written in 1894. Again, the instrumentation was slightly unusual (I’d never heard a two-cello quartet before), and this—with the marvelous cellist David Finckel’s help—lent a profound sonority to the already somber opening theme. There were moments of agile, festive rapidity in this twenty-five minute piece, which contained a number of alluring tunes, but it was that opening theme and its deep note of feeling that kept coming back. I thought it seemed slightly familiar—though I was sure I’d never heard anything by Arensky before—and at the intermission a more knowledgeable listener informed me that the same theme, derived from a Russian Orthodox chant, appears in both Mussorgsky’s Boris Gudonov and one of Beethoven’s Razumovsky quartets. So as it turned out, I had heard those familiar notes before.
After the intermission we had Mily Balakirev’s Octet for Wind, Strings, and Piano, which again was hugely pleasurable. This time I had never even heard of the composer, much less the piece, but this spirited work from 1855 certainly established him in my mind. And then came the two Shostakovich works: the 1931 novelty, which is what had brought me to the concert in the first place, and the 1948 piece, written at a moment of maximum crisis in Shostakovich’s life. (His music had just been banned for being too abstract, and he had been told by Soviet officialdom that he needed to incorporate more folk music in his work. But Shostakovich, in his typically sardonic way, responded by borrowing his folk elements from the despised Jewish subculture—hardly the way to win back the apparatchiks’ hearts.)
The debut of the impromptu was less exciting than I expected, but that is my fault entirely. Since one of my favorite Shostakovich works—the Viola Sonata of 1975, probably the last thing he ever completed—has exactly the same instrumentation, I was expecting more than a bit of pleasant fluff. Paul Neubauer was excellent on the viola and Wu Han performed the piano part admirably, but nothing was ever going to make this work more than it seemed on the surface: that is, an occasional piece designed for a theatrical interlude or an informal get-together by a hardworking twenty-five-year old composer.
The good thing, though, is that my mild disappointment set me up to receive “From Jewish Folk Poetry” with even more gratitude than I might normally have felt. Even if you can’t understand the words, the musical exchanges among the soprano, alto, baritone, and pianist are wrenching and terrifying; and when you learn that the lyrics are all about sick or dead children, hateful rebellious daughters, deserted fathers, old age, rural poverty, occasional sharp moments of joy, and other aspects of Russian-Jewish life, the poignance becomes even more intense. I was particularly struck by Gilbert Kalish’s understated but intense piano-playing and Sara Couden’s wonderful contralto voice, but the whole thing was terrific and indeed hair-raising in the way that only the best Shostakovich can be. It made a fitting end to a glorious concert.