What’s in a Name? Piano Works from Three Centuries
Har r y Haskell
The traditional-sounding titles of the four works on tonight’s program mask a variety of innovative approaches to musical form. Both Dmitri Shostakovich and Franz Liszt rejected the thematically diverse, multimovement layout of the classical sonata in favor of tightly organized, single- movement structures that reflected composers’ increasing taste for organicism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Johann Sebastian Bach supplemented the conventional instrumental dance suite of his day—typically built around a core sequence of allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue —with a variety of other popular and courtly dances, as well as movements of a less dance-like character.Two hundred years later, Nikos Skalkottas poured new wine into old bottles by using the neoclassical suite as a familiar, historically evocative container for his radically unfamiliar music. A Work of Extraordinary Ferocity Born in 1906, Shostakovich came of age in the 1920s, during the brief halcyon period of the workers’ state. Throughout his life, the highly strung composer would play an elaborate game of feint and attack with the Communist Party’s cultural apparatchiks, cannily balancing his more abrasive, cutting-edge music with a stream of reassuringly patriotic and artistically conservative works. Composed in 1926, the acerbically dissonant Piano Sonata No. 1 followed close on the heels of Shostakovich’s popular First Symphony, which had transformed the teenage composer into something of an international celebrity. If, as contemporaries reported (but Shostakovich later denied), the sonata was originally titled “October,” the allusion to the Russian Revolution may have been calculated to deflect criticism of 16
