Rarely heard Shostakovich chamber music at Alice Tully Hall
NEW YORK – The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center continues to demonstrate its commitment to thoughtful, artistically ambitious programming, and this all-Shostakovich Sunday afternoon concert offered a compelling example of how historical insight and musical excellence can reinforce one another. By juxtaposing an early chamber work with a late song cycle and the composer’s final symphony, the program traced Shostakovich’s lifelong negotiation between private expression and public expectation under the Soviet state, allowing the music’s irony, restraint and emotional ambiguity to emerge with particular clarity.
The performance of Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok emerged as the program’s expressive core. Composed in 1967 for Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, the cycle belongs to a moment of intense artistic introspection late in Shostakovich’s life in the aftermath of serious illness. Setting poems by the Symbolist poet Blok, whose work was viewed uneasily by Soviet authorities, Shostakovich fashioned a sequence of stark nocturnal visions, bleak prophecies and inward laments.
The composer responds to Blok’s texts through radical restraint. Each song is defined by a single instrumental presence, with voice and accompaniment kept deliberately exposed. The cello’s solitary line in ‘Ophelia’s Song’ establishes an atmosphere of isolation, while the piano’s stark outbursts in ‘Gamayun’ introduce menace. In ‘We were together’, the violin’s fragile lyricism briefly suggests intimacy before receding into austerity. Silences carry as much weight as sound, and the delayed appearance of the full ensemble heightens the sense of physical vulnerability embedded in the music’s structure. When voice and trio finally converge in ‘Music’, the effect remains tentative, reinforcing the work’s inward focus and avoidance of resolution.
Soprano Andriana Chuchman delivered a powerful and unvarnished performance, her clear, incisive Russian lending authority to Blok’s charged imagery. From the hushed inwardness of ‘Ophelia’s Song’ to the final ‘Music’, she fashioned the cycle as an intimate psychological narrative. Throughout, she was supported by instrumental playing of concentration, balance and expressive discipline from the members of the Sitkovetsky Trio, allowing the music’s tensions to register naturally.
The same ensemble had opened the program with Trio No.1, written in 1923 when Shostakovich was just seventeen. Cast in a single movement and described by the composer as a ‘poem’, the work reveals a lyrical, openly romantic voice, offering little hint of the irony and bitterness that would later mark his music. Two contrasting thematic ideas, one chromatically inflected and laden with pathos, the other more diatonic and songful, are set in continual opposition, lending the piece a rhapsodic, almost improvisatory character.
The trio embraced the music’s combination of melancholy and youthful ardor rather than tempering it, allowing long-breathed string lines to unfold freely while the piano’s animated figurations propelled the music forward. Given the cello’s prominent role in the work, Isang Enders shaped its expansive melodies with focus and tonal depth, providing the emotional anchor of the performance. Alexander Sitkovetsky brought suppleness and warmth to the violin line, complementing the cello’s lyricism without excess. At the piano, Wu Qian balanced clarity and momentum, driving the music forward while maintaining a sensitively chamber-scaled presence. The unguarded energy of the closing pages, delivered without apology, underscored the ensemble’s belief in the work’s sincerity and directness.
Edward Sava-Segal
