BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Seiji Ozawa, Music Director
Sir Colin Davis, Principal Guest Conductor
Joseph Silverstein, Assistant Conductor One Hundredth Season, 1980-81
PRE-SYMPHONY CHAMBER CONCERTS
Thursday, 20 November at 6 Saturday, 22 November at 6
SHEILA FIEKOWSKY, violin NANCY BRACKEN, violin BERNARD KADINOFF, viola ROBERT RIPLEY, cello
MICHAEL ZARETSKY, viola TATIANA YAMPOLSKY, piano
SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet No. 7, Opus 108
Allegretto Lento Allegro
Mmes. FIEKOWSKY and BRACKEN, Messrs. KADINOFF and RIPLEY
SHOSTAKOVICH Viola Sonata, Opus 147 Moderato Allegretto Adagio
Mr. ZARETSKY and Ms. YAMPOLSKY
made possible by ^S StateStreet
Baldwin piano
Please exit to your left for supper following the concert.
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String Quartet No. 7, Opus 108
Shostakovich wrote the seventh of his fifteen string quartets in 1960, a memorial tribute to his first wife, Nina Vasilyevna. Like so much of the chamber music of his last years, this quartet is imbued with an inwardness, a sense of personal expression that is not always present in the sometimes bombastic public statements that were his symphonies. The second movement in particular forecasts in many ways the subjectivity and the spare, almost austere style of his later quartets. The first movement, highly rhythmic in character, is a compressed sonata form with little or no development of the two main themes, which take on a different metrical guise in the recapitulation. Throughout the second movement there is scarcely a moment when all four instruments are playing simultaneously (it happens just once, for six measures, when viola and cello are doubled in octaves under the two violin parts). For the rest, the texture is limited to two or three parts only, a simplicity that Shostakovich much relished in this repertoire. The final
Allegro begins with a wild fugue that is eventually transformed into an odd waltz-like movement suggesting gentle grotesqueries before fading away.
Dmitri Shostakovich Viola Sonata, Opus 147
Shostakovich was putting the finishing touches on this, his final work, when he died on
9 August 1975 (the first announcement in the United States of his death came at Tanglewood, where Mstislav Rostropovich was just about to begin conducting a performance of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony; no one who was in the audience that day will forget the shock of the news or the conductor's innately Russian gesture of homage in kissing the score as he closed it after the performance). The sonata was composed for the violist of the Beethoven Quartet, Fedor Druzhinin (a pupil of and replacement for the original violist Vadim Borisovsky). It is a pensive, autumnal work, like so much of the music of the composer's last years. The viola is featured throughout, even to the extent of beginning and ending the entire sonata unaccompanied and having several lengthy and difficult cadenzas. The first movement builds from the pizzicato opening to a powerful climax with both instruments. The Allegretto is overtly folklike and filled with characteristic dance rhythms and melodies of intensely Russian character. In the final Adagio, the longest movement of the sonata, Shostakovich writes deeply introspective music that closes in a long morendo ("dying away"),-the composer's own final farewell.
— Steven Ledbetter
37
Iftk Sheila Fiekowsky
Sheila Fiekowsky was born in Detroit, Michigan, and has been a violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1975. She began her study of the violin at age nine with Emily Austin of the Detroit Symphony, was a soloist with that orchestra at the age of sixteen, and won the National Federation of Music Clubs Biennial Award that same year. Ms. Fiekowsky attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and studied there with Ivan Galamian. She has also studied with BSO concertmaster Joseph Silverstein, and she holds a master of music degree from Yale University. Before joining the Boston Symphony, Ms. Fiekowsky was a member of the Andreas Quartet at Yale's Summer Music Festival in Norfolk, Connecticut.
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38 Nancy Bracken
University of Buffalo and Eastman School of Music. She received her master's degree from Eastman in 1977, and before joining the violins of the Boston Symphony in 1979 she was a member for two years of the Cleveland Orchestra's second violin section. Ms. Bracken was concertmaster of the Colorado
Philharmonic for two summers, a first violin-
ist with the Rochester Philharmonic, first violin of a graduate string quartet assisting
Nancy Bracken studied at the Curtis Institute the Cleveland String Quartet at Eastman, of Music in Philadelphia, where she was a and a first violinist with the orchestras of the student of Ivan Galamian, and later at the Aspen and Grand Teton summer festivals.
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