The Soviet Experience Volume Iv Also with the Pacifica Quartet on Cedille Records String Quartets by Shostakovich: Quartets Nos
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THE SOVIET EXPERIENCE VOLUME IV ALSO WITH THE PACIFICA QUARTET ON CEDILLE RECORDS STRING QUARTETS BY SHOSTAKOVICH: QUARTETS NOS. 13-15 THE SOVIET EXPERIENCE VOL III DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH CDR 90000 138 SCHNITTKE: QUARTET No. 3 “This Shostakovich cycle is turning out to be one of the AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES most riveting of recent years. Pacifica’s Shostakovich cycle already is shaping up as definitive.” —BBC Music Magazine THE SOVIET EXPERIENCE VOLUME II STRING QUARTETS BY THE SOVIET EXPERIENCE VOL II DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES SHOSTAKOVICH: QUARTETS NOS. 1-- 4 CDR 90000 130 PROKOFIEV: QUARTET NO. 2 “Having reached the halfway point, the Pacifica’s Shostakovich cycle already is shaping up as definitive, even in a field stocked with . formidable Russian contenders.” PACIFICA QUARTET —The Classical Review SovietExpVol2_Mech.indd 1 12/9/11 10:41 AM THE SOVIET EXPERIENCE VOL I CDR 90000 127 “The excellent Pacifica Quartet . offers electrifying interpretations . The group conveys every shade of Shostakovich’s extreme emotional palette.” —The New York Times MENDELSSOHN: THE COMPLETE STRING QUARTETS CDR 90000 082 “This box sets a new gold standard for performances of Mendelssohn’s string quartets.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch PACIFICA QUARTET SovietExpVol4_MECH.indd 1 10/2/2013 2:58:04 PM Producer & Engineer Judith Sherman THE SOVIET EXPERIENCE VOLUME IV PACIFICA QUARTET Assistant Engineer & Digital Editing Bill Maylone Shostakovich Quartet No. 14 and (most of) 15 Editing James Ginsburg STRING QUARTETS BY SHOSTAKOVICH: QUARTETS NOS. 13-15 Editing Assistance Jeanne Velonis DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH SCHNITTKE: QUARTET NO. 3 Recorded Shostakovich Quartets Nos. 13 and 14: December 16–18, 2012; Shostakovich Quartet No. 15 and Schnittke Quartet No. 3: August 24–26, 2013 — Auer Hall, Indiana University AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES Bloomington DISC ONE Microphones Sonodore RCM-402 & DPA 4006-TL Front Cover Design Sue Cottrill Inside Booklet & Inlay Card Nancy Bieschke DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975) Front Cover Art Always on the guard of Homeland!,1973, by V. Chumakov String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat minor, Op. 138 1 Adagio —Doppio movimento —Tempo primo (19:15) available at www.sovietposters.ru String Quartet No. 14 in F-sharp major, Op. 142 (25:45) PUBLISHERS 2 I. Allegretto (8:41) Schnittke Sikorski — String Quartet No. 3, Op © 1983 (SIK6752) 3 II. Adagio (8:43) Shostakovich Sikorski — String Quartet No. 13, Op. 138 © 1970 (SIK2170); String Quartet No. 14, 4 III. Allegretto (8:18) Op. 142 © 1972 (SIK2175); String Quartet No. 15, Op. 144 © 1974 (SIK2204) TT: (45:12) DISC TWO Cedille Records is a trademark of Cedille Chicago, NFP, a not-for-profit foundation devoted to promoting the finest PACIFICA QUARTET musicians and ensembles in the Chicago area. Cedille Chicago’s activities are supported in part by contributions and DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Simin Ganatra, violin grants from individuals, foundations, corporations, and government agencies including the Irving Harris Foundation, String Quartet No. 15 in E-flat minor, Op. 144 (36:10) Sibbi Bernhardsson, violin Kirkland & Ellis Foundation, MacArthur Fund for Arts and Culture at Prince, Negaunee Foundation, Sage Foundation, and 1 I. Elegy: Adagio (11:39) 2 II. Serenade: Adagio (5:49) Masumi Per Rostad, viola the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. 3 III. Intermezzo: Adagio (1:44) Brandon Vamos, cello 4 IV. Nocturne: Adagio (4:27) 5 V. Funeral March: Adagio molto (5:37) CONTRIBUTIONS TO CEDILLE CHICAGO, NFP MAY BE 6 VI. Epilogue: Adagio (6:52) MADE AT CEDILLERECORDS.ORG OR 773-989-2515. ALFRED SCHNITTKE (1934–1998) String Quartet No. 3 (22:54) CEDILLE RECORDS® trademark of 7 I. Andante (6:14) Cedille Chicago, NFP 8 1205 W Balmoral Ave., Chicago IL 60640, USA II. Agitato (8:18) 773.989.2515 tel • 773.989.2517 fax 9 III. Pesante (8:20) CEDILLERECORDS.ORG CDR 90000 145 P & C 2013 Cedille Records TT: (59:16) All Rights Reserved. Made in U.S.A 3 Shostakovich Quartets 13, 14 & 15 These forced a daily awareness ...[a] subjectivity that forcibly personal style of playing in mind. Schnittke Quartet 3 that his remaining time was short, brings the extremes together The first of these solos roots the Notes by Gerard McBurney and made even the physical act of in the moment, fills the dense subsequent sound of the whole writing music on paper painful and polyphony with its tensions, quartet in the rich, somber world of The idea of Late Style has been much awkward. breaks it apart with the unisono, the viola’s lower strings. The second, pondered. In his celebrated essay, and disengages itself, leaving... Amazingly, these difficulties appear as though under the impact of the On Late Style: Music and Literature naked tone behind; that sets to have stimulated him creatively as musical and psychological traverse Against the Grain, literary theorist the mere phrase as a monument much as they held him back. Unable of the whole composition, ends by Edward Said, then approaching his to what has been, marking a to hold a pen for more than limited climbing towards the highest and own end, observed: subjectivity turned to stone... amounts of time, he seems (to judge most fragile sounds of which this The accepted notion is that age by the music itself) to have set about Caesuras... sudden discontinuities... most paradoxical of instruments is confers a spirit of reconciliation internalizing the mystical action moments of breaking away... capable. and serenity on late works, of composing with ever greater [when] the work is silent at the From earliest youth, Shostakovich often expressed in terms of a intensity. The imaginative result was instant when it is left behind, and had shown a fascination with the miraculous transfiguration of a language that, if not completely turns its emptiness outward... compositional possibilities of music reality.... But what of artistic distinct from that of his earlier referring to other music, whether lateness not as harmony and music, unquestionably stands at an Shostakovich —dedicated each of by quoting from his own or other resolution, but as intransigence, awkward and sometimes startling composers’ pieces, or by parodying difficulty and contradiction? his 11th through 14th quartets angle to it — a language indeed to the individual members of the different styles and ideas, sometimes What if age and ill health don’t often filled with “intransigence, angrily, sometimes comically or produce serenity at all? Beethoven Quartet, with whom he difficulty and contradiction.” had worked closely for decades. The even affectionately. In the rarified Such thoughts come into sharp As we listen to these quartets, we 13th was his gift for the Beethovens’ world of his later music, however, focus when we turn our ears to might well be reminded of German violist, Vadim Borisovsky. Like its this old creative habit undergoes Shostakovich’s last three quartets. musicologist Theodor W. Adorno’s predecessors, it includes tributes to a subtle change. Intertextual Although the composer was not famous description of the main both the instrument and the artistry references, while still ubiquitous and especially old when he wrote this characteristics of late Beethoven (as of the dedicatee — in particular, recognizable, now become ethereal, music — only in his 60s — he was quoted by Said): beginning and ending with long elliptical, etiolated, and allusive. assailed with health problems. solos written with Borisovsky’s We hear this in the opening of the 4 5 13th Quartet, where three ideas are is a curious aspect of Shostakovich’s prancing, mocking, and marked The same ghostly tapping continues presented, one after another, each late style that, while he showed doppio movimento — is initiated into the slow final section of the fraught with shadowy suggestions of little interest in religion in his daily by a little rhythmic motif in the quartet, when the three themes of other worlds and each with its own life, the sound of religious music first violin. In the composer’s 14th the opening reappear but none quite distinctive character. gained increasing importance in his Symphony, completed a year earlier, as we heard them at the beginning. First comes that dedicatory viola compositions. this motif was used to set words by Each has been transfigured by the solo, a lamentation formed from a After another brief solo, from Guillaume Apollinaire conveying experience of the intervening dance 12-note row, although most listeners the first violin but echoing the a woman’s bitter reaction to the of death. will hear it rather as a series of viola’s opening, the second violin slaughter of the First World War: — interlocked descending chromatic introduces a third idea, also Khokhochu! Khokhochu! Shostakovich’s 14th Quartet scales, like sobs fading into the evocative of Russian Orthodox I laugh... laugh... at the beautiful completes his cycle of four distance. Shostakovich toyed with chanting but, more importantly loves cut down by death hommages to the Beethoven Quartet with a large-scale three- 12-note rows often in his later works, and strikingly, alluding to one of The restless texture of this central but he never treated them as true Shostakovich’s favorite works of movement work dedicated to the section of the quartet is also richly Quartet’s cellist, Sergei Shirinsky. rows in the manner of Schoenberg Russian music: Mussorgsky’s opera polyphonic. Shostakovich was one and his pupils. He instead preferred Boris Godunov. The reference is to From its first notes this piece of the contrapuntal masters of the establishes a quite different tone to use them, as he does here, as Boris’s famous death-scene, and the 20th century and here he finds a quarries for shorter motifs with haunting moment when the heart- from that of its predecessor. While whole variety of spidery and delicate the 13th Quartet (1970) prompts which to unify long paragraphs of broken Tsar tells his young son how ways to combine wraiths and echoes music, and also as a way of opening to govern Russia wisely once Boris comparisons to the 14th Symphony of his opening three ideas.