{"id":772,"date":"2017-01-12T11:03:40","date_gmt":"2017-01-12T18:03:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=772"},"modified":"2017-01-12T11:03:40","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T18:03:40","slug":"pacifica-shostakovich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/pacifica-shostakovich\/","title":{"rendered":"Pacifica Shostakovich"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I’m in New York, good music is only a short subway ride away. But now that I’m back home in Berkeley, I have to range somewhat farther afield. Last night, my husband and I drove for well over an hour\u00a0on post-rain, pre-rain, rush-hour highways to get down to Music@Menlo’s mid-winter concert, featuring the Pacifica Quartet<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And of course it was worth it. The Pacifica Quartet is always worth it, in my experience, and in this case they were playing a delicious program in which Shostakovich’s Third Quartet was sandwiched between Beethoven’s Opus 18, No. 6 and Ravel’s sole quartet, the\u00a0F Major. These four outstanding players\u2014great individually, but even better together\u2014do Beethoven beautifully, as I’ve learned over the years; and getting to hear them do the Ravel, which I haven’t heard live since about 2006, was also a notable pleasure. But the standout of the evening, for me and I think for the rest of the audience, was Shostakovich’s Third. First performed in 1946, this five-movement piece speaks not only to all the difficulties of Shostakovich’s era (the Second World War, Stalin’s persecutions, the deaths of close friends)\u00a0but also to the difficulties of ours. Not a moment in it is wasted on trivialities or anodyne\u00a0prettiness; not a moment is without deep, persuasive emotion. This quartet\u00a0seems to say, Yes, things are terrible now, and they will continue to be terrible, but perhaps we will survive\u00a0for a while yet,\u00a0if we manage to retain our sense of being human, collectively and individually.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

From the long, attentive silence that greeted the end of this powerful piece, I presume the rest of the audience was getting the same message I was. And it would not at all surprise me if Shostakovich’s quartets, which\u00a0address\u00a0so clearly the troubles of our time, were to experience something of a resurgence in the next four years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I’m in New York, good music is only a short subway ride away. But now that I’m back home in Berkeley, I have to range somewhat farther afield. Last night, my husband and I drove for well over an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[28,224,90,10,21],"class_list":["post-772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-beethoven","tag-musicmenlo","tag-pacifica-quartet","tag-ravel","tag-shostakovich"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=772"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":773,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions\/773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}