Shostakovich: Cello Sonata

Description

Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975)Viola Sonata Cello Sonata (arranged for viola by AnnetteBartholdy)Among the select band of twentieth-century composers whohave brought the private voice of the viola to public attention, Shostakovichjoins the even more select majority with a single masterpiece to their credit(others springing most readily to mind are Britten's Lachrymae and Walton'sViola Concerto). The very fact that his Sonata for viola and piano would seemto be the last word from his death-haunted final years gives it a very specialplace in the repertoire. We are now doubly blessed that the transcription forviola of his much earlier Cello Sonata of 1934, brought most fully to westernattention by Annette Bartholdy's serious championship, offers us two works forviola-players from the two most liberated phases of Shostakovich's creativelife.Comparing the early 1930s in this way to the early 1970s isonly relevant because in the first case a curtain was about to fall whichrestricted Shostakovich's artistic freedoms; the imminence of the second andfinal curtain, on the other hand, was the very thing which allowed thosefreedoms to resurface in their most refined and introspective form. The CelloSonata could have been like the audacious large-scale masterpieces that camebefore and after it, the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and the most bewilderingof all his symphonies, the Fourth. Instead it seems to reflect hisfellow-composer Prokofiev's thoughts of the same time on a 'new simplicity',embracing the kind of melody that 'though simple or accessible, should notbecome a refrain or a trivial turn of phrase'. For both composers, this wassomething they embraced of their own free will: Prokofiev had only just made uphis mind to return permanently to the Soviet Union when he wrote those words in1934, and the Shostakovich sonata's first performance, given by its dedicateeViktor Kubatsky and the composer that December, came over a year before thenotorious Pravda attacks on Lady Macbeth as 'chaos instead of music', whichchanged the course of what was permissible in Soviet music. Kubatsky was a fineall-round musician, but later performances, including those recorded by thecomposer with Daniil Shafran and Mstislav Rostropovich, surpassed his performance.Clearly, as Annette Bartholdy points out, the alternative versions for violamade first by Kubatsky himself and later by Yevgeny Strakhov, a respected violateacher in the 1960s and 1970s, gave other instrumentalists a chance.Back in the early days of the sonata's performing history,the Fourth Symphony would not have passed the new censorship, and Shostakovichswiftly withdrew it, but the clarity and apparent directness of the sonatacould hardly earn retrospective disapproval. The light-of-touch cantabilemelody at the start easily evades the D minor in which it is rooted, though thesoloist soon hints at the nagging narrow intervals so characteristic of thecomposer before the pianist again flies away from the point. The