Postcard from Nalchik: Haydn / Prokofiev / Shostakovich by Delphian Records

POSTCARD FROM NALCHIK

Haydn I Prokofiev I Shostakovich

Edinburgh Quartet

Tristan Gurney violin Gordon Bragg violin Jessica Beeston viola Mark Bailey cello

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809): String Quartet in E flat major (‘The Joke’), Op. 33 No. 2

1 Allegro moderato [5:10]

2 Scherzo: Allegro [3:23]

3 Largo e sostenuto [5:08]

4 Finale: Presto [3:20]

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953): String Quartet No. 2 in F major, Op. 92

5 Allegro sostenuto [5:59]

6 Adagio [7:41]

7 Allegro [8:35]

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975): String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110

8 Largo – [4:42]

9 Allegro molto – [2:52]

10 Allegretto – [4:14]

11 Largo – [4:58]

12 Largo [3:36]

Total playing time [59:46]

Recorded on 19–21 June 2013 in Broughton St Mary’s Parish Church, Edinburgh

Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter

24-bit digital editing: Adam Binks

24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter Quartet photography: Julie Tinton

Cover image: Lado Gudiashvili (1896–1980), View of the village of Ishguli, Svanetia, Georgia (oil on canvas), 1923 / Private collection / Photo © Sphinx Fine Art / The Bridgeman Art Library Design: Drew Padrutt Booklet editor: John Fallas Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK

According to Valentin Berlinsky, the late, great cellist patriarch of the Borodin Quartet, Shostakovich used to question the group’s across-the-board espousal of new works with ‘what, you haven’t played all of Haydn’s quartets yet?’ He had a point. How many quartets have explored the Austrian master’s vast corpus of 68 official works in the genre in the way that many have devoted concert series and recording projects to Beethoven cycles? And yet Haydn was just as much a pioneer for his time, besides being a hugely influential figure on Shostakovich and Prokofiev, a composer of far greater stature than his usual slotting-in as first on the programme might suggest.

Haydn and wife of the man destined to become Tsar Paul I (the pug-nosed laughing-stock of history satirised in Alexander Faintsimmer’s superb 1933 film fantasy Lieutenant Kijé, immortalised by Prokofiev’s incidental music).

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Often, seeming simplicity conceals depths and innovation in Haydn’s music – and this is especially so in the set of six quartets he offered in December 1781 for manuscript subscription by wealthy patrons, advertising them to at least one of the wealthy as ‘written in a new and special way, for I have not composed any for ten years’. Published by Artaria the following year, the six were no doubt performed at the Esterházy Palace of Haydn’s princely sponsor, Prince Nikolaus, in the town on the Austro-Hungarian border we now know as Eisenstadt. But their first public airing was on Christmas Day 1782 in the Vienna apartments of Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna of Russia, born Sophie Dorothea, Princess of Württemberg, a piano pupil of

For this reason, and on account especially of the dedication of the Op. 33 set to Grand Duke Paul, the six quartets share the nickname ‘Russian’, though there are no obvious Slavic inflections in any of them, let alone the use of Russian folksongs we find in Beethoven’s three quartets for Count Rasumovsky. What’s for certain is that the ‘new and special way’ marks a simplification after the austerity and brilliance of the previous set, Op. 20, of 1772. The first violin leads the way in all movements of the String Quartet in E flat major, Op. 33 No. 2 except the Largo e sostenuto, where Haydn distributes the reflective main melody in mostly two-part writing between various permutations: first between the viola and cello, then the two violins with cello elaboration, and in later treatments between second violin and viola with the first carolling above, and finally with the first violin leading and the other three supporting.

The consummate sonata-form first movement only darkens the picture in the development, introduced by the cello and leading to a shadowy C minor. The blithe 6/8 rondo finale appears to offer no such complications until the melody stops in its tracks, encounters four surprise bars of Adagio, sets off again and

meets first three short pauses and one long one. After which the first phrase of the main subject sets off and stops dead. End of quartet – to much mirth, apparently, among Haydn’s audiences, hence a more suitable nickname for the quartet: ‘The Joke’.

Such sobriquets often come as a surprise to listeners who expect the whole work to reflect the tag. The young Prokofiev, studying the score of Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 in G major in the St Petersburg Conservatoire junior conducting class of Nikolai Tcherepnin, noted that: ‘It never occurred to me before that its name (then “Drum stroke”, now “Surprise”) derives purely from one drum beat in the sixteenth bar of the Andante.’ The lessons of his successful performance as conductor were not forgotten when he made his breezy homage to the Mozart/Haydn era in his own ‘Classical’ Symphony four years later in 1917. But in his String Quartet No. 1 of 1930, the example was the Beethoven of the later quartets married to Russian folk inflections.

String Quartet No. 2 could not be more different, and the thorny spirit of the age in which it was written, coercing Prokofiev to look further afield for a national idiom, provides the explanation. Obligatory ‘research’ into the music of the ethnic groups which made up the Soviet empire served composers as one way out of directly glorifying the state from the 1930s onwards. Prokofiev marked it after

his own fashion in the hard-to-come-by Five Kazakh Songs of 1927, the depictions of the Tartars in his film scores and a barely-started opera, Khan Buzai. He made his one sustained sally into the ethnic field when circumstances would otherwise have left him idle. This was in the grim year of 1941, when the German invasion drove him along with other distinguished Moscow artists to Nalchik, in the Kabarda region of the northern Caucasus. The local chairman of the arts committee, father of the distinguished conductor Yuri Temirkanov, encouraged him to write a work based on local themes and Prokofiev, when he listened to the local archive’s recording of Kabardian music, found it ‘very fresh and original’.

Outwardly, the ‘Kabardian’ quartet behaves well, keeping the two folk themes of its first movement strictly within classical sonata form; their energy is enough to link them with Prokofiev’s own preference for clear rhythmic profiles. The melancholy nocturne of the Adagio contrasts with a livelier central theme supported by nimble pizzicati, and is poignantly, economically varied on its return; ‘Getigezhev Ogurbi’, the main candidate of the finale, is pure dance with vigorous syncopations. Yet the first-movement development, if not as abrasive as Bartók’s middle-period quartets or Prokofiev’s own piano sonatas of the same time, raises a shadow of menace not quite dispelled by the recapitulation, and in the finale both a fierce E flat minor episode and an F minor passage

introduced by an eloquent cello cadenza undercut the festivities. Was Prokofiev hinting at the darker implications of native cultures absorbed into Stalin’s realm? Whatever the case, his attitude to his ethnic material is far from simplistic.

Apart from his occasional Overture on Russian and Kirghiz Themes Shostakovich seriously celebrated only one ethnic minority in his music: the threatened Jewish people. In his chamber music, the strongest stylisations of Jewish dance music – one eye wet, the other dry, as the composer defined its special characteristic – came in the Fourth Quartet and the Second Piano Trio, the ferocious sweep of the latter work’s finale quoted in String Quartet No. 8. Ostensibly this was a memorial to the loss and destruction that had embraced the Holocaust. Deprived of the kind of funds which had allowed the Western sector of Berlin to begin to flourish, Dresden was still in ruins when, in the summer of 1960, Shostakovich travelled there to work on music for the joint East German-Soviet film Five Days and Five Nights, directed by Lev Arnshtam. That September, he wrote in the newspaper Izvestia that ‘the horrors of the air-raids suffered by the people of Dresden, whose stories we heard, suggested the theme for my Eighth Quartet. In only a few days, under the impression of the film we are making about what happened, I wrote the score of my new quartet. I dedicate it to the victims of the war and fascism.’

A worthy dedication, no doubt, and a sincere one. Yet the fact that the Eighth String Quartet is in fact, or rather simultaneously, autobiographical from first to last is confirmed not only by the musical quotations within the work but also by what Shostakovich wrote in a very different context. Commentators are often too anxious to find a ‘Stalin subtext’ in works where it can’t be proven, but the source here, a revelatory letter of 19 July 1960 to Isaak Glikman, provides one of the only undisputed instances where Shostakovich wrote or spoke of what his music was ‘about’.

In it, Shostakovich tells Glikman how in Germany he wrote not the film scores he was there to complete but ‘this ideologically flawed quartet which is of no use to anybody’. The letter needs no more than the occasional amplification, which I give in square brackets.

I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself. [Was this preparatory to his perception of joining the Communist party that September as a suicidal act? Another friend, Lev Lebedinsky, felt certain it was.] The title page could carry the dedication: ‘To the memory of the composer of this quartet’.

The basic theme of the quartet is the four notes D natural, E flat, C natural, B natural – that is, my initials, D. SCH. [Shostakovich is following a German transliteration, and using German note-names – ‘S’ is E flat, ‘H’ is B. The motto, first heard prominently in the First Violin Concerto and Tenth Symphony

of the late 1940s and early 1950s respectively, launches the present work.] The quartet also uses themes from some of my own compositions and the Revolutionary song ‘Tormented by grievous bondage’ [right at the end, like a death-warrant]. The themes from my own works are as follows: from the First Symphony [a frail echo of its opening challenge in the bars following the statement of DSCH], the Eighth Symphony, the [Piano] Trio [No. 2, furiously reiterating the second Jewish finale theme in the context of the equally angry scherzo here], the Cello Concerto [No. 1] and Lady Macbeth [a moment of heartbreaking tenderness, the only one in the entire quartet, as the cello intones Katerina’s loving caress of her lover Seryozha in the fourth movement].

It is a pseudo-tragic quartet, so much so that while I was composing it I shed the same amount of tears as I would have to pee after a dozen beers. When I got home, I tried to play it through, but always

ended up in tears. This was of course a response not so much to the pseudo-tragedy as to its superlative unity of form.

After that devastatingly laconic summary, with its strange passing notes of forced jocularity, the only thing left to do is to listen and reflect.

© 2014 David Nice

David Nice is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster with a special interest in Russian music, and a graduate of the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of short studies on Elgar, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky and the history of opera, and the first volume of his Prokofiev biography, From Russia to the West 1891–1935, is published by Yale University Press; he is currently working on the second. A regular contributor to BBC Radio 3, BBC Music Magazine and the online professional reviews site The Arts Desk (www.theartsdesk.com), he also writes a blog, I’ll Think of Something Later (www.davidnice.blogspot.com).

Edinburgh Quartet

The Edinburgh Quartet was founded in 1960 and quickly became established as one of Britain’s foremost chamber ensembles. It achieved international recognition after winning the Contemporary Prize at the Evian-les-Bains String Quartet Competition and has since toured extensively across Europe, the Far East, North and South America and the Middle East, as well as appearing regularly at prestigious venues across the UK including the Southbank Centre and Wigmore Hall, London.

In addition to a busy concert schedule the Edinburgh Quartet is frequently featured in radio broadcasts for the BBC and other stations. Recently this has included live appearances on Classics Unwrapped (BBC Radio Scotland) and Jazz Line-Up (BBC Radio 3) as well as video recordings for Studio One Sessions, which appear on the BBC Radio Scotland website.

The Edinburgh Quartet is committed to nurturing talent and is resident at Edinburgh Napier University and the University of Aberdeen. It is also about to embark on a new residency at the University of Stirling, and continues to maintain a strong association with the University of Edinburgh. As well as giving

a regular classical concert series at each of these institutions, the players work with composition students, instrumentalists and student teachers. In addition to its work with university students the Quartet’s outreach programme encompasses workshops for primary and secondary school pupils, and tutoring adults at the Variations Summer School in Ullapool and on an annual Spring Chamber Music Course in Linlithgow.

The Quartet has always been a champion of new music and has worked with many important and prolific composers of our age including James MacMillan, Michael Tippett and Howard Blake. Its extensive discography is available on labels including Delphian, Linn, Meridian and RCA, and includes the complete string quartets of Hans Gál, Kenneth Leighton and Mátyás Seiber, as well as discs of Bartók, Robert Crawford, Haydn, Schubert and Thomas Wilson. Its next recording – Delphian DCD34088, forthcoming in summer 2014 – will feature string quartets by James MacMillan, including Etwas zurückhaltend (‘String Quartet No 0’), written for and premiered by the Quartet in 2009.

www.edinburghquartet.com

Robert Crawford: String Quartets Nos 1–3

Edinburgh Quartet

DCD34091

Delphian’s second disc of chamber music by Robert Crawford – the first (DCD34055) also featured the Edinburgh Quartet, joining Nicholas Ashton in the Piano Quintet. This second volume was released shortly before Crawford’s death in January 2012, aged 86, and pays fitting tribute to a composer whose long friendship with the Edinburgh Quartet ultimately brought him back to composition after three decades’ silence. Given here in characteristically vivid readings, these three fine works thus offer a fascinating overview of Crawford’s stylistic development; the second in particular, with its inspired wit and infectious musicality, deserves far greater renown.

‘Dedicated performances … a worthwhile release’

– Gramophone, February 2012

Mátyás Seiber: String Quartets Nos 1–3

Edinburgh Quartet

DCD34082

Mátyás Seiber’s three string quartets span his career, from the astonishingly assured student essay of the first – composed in 1924 at the age of just eighteen – to the mature synthesis of his third and final Quartetto Lirico.

Seiber’s work was nourished by several of the twentieth century’s most significant stylistic trends, from jazz and serialism to the folk music of his native Hungary. He was also, like many of the mid-century’s most important artists, an émigré and an influential teacher; fifty years after his untimely death, Hugh Wood’s booklet essay pays tribute to his lasting influence on a generation of British composers.

‘[The Edinburgh Quartet] marry technical address to expressive insights, and the results are illuminating not least because the fine recording, in Prestonkirk Parish Church, East Linton, is first-class … Seiber’s quartets are in the best of hands on this enlightening disc’

– MusicWeb International, September 2010

Thomas Wilson: A Chamber Portrait

Edinburgh Quartet, Simon Smith piano, Allan Neave guitar

DCD34079

An influential figure both personally and musically, Thomas Wilson (1927–2001) was the leading light in a group of composers whose vision and technical assurance brought an international modernism into twentiethcentury Scottish music. In the chamber works collected here, moments of extraordinary stillness continually release into fast, propulsive writing whose compelling energies are matched by the individual and collective virtuosity of Simon Smith, Allan Neave and the Edinburgh Quartet.

‘Delphian are to be warmly congratulated for bringing these tough but elegant, closely argued and well-crafted works to a wider public … Superbly committed performances in vivid recordings’

– Tempo, October 2009

The Cold Dancer: contemporary string quartets from Scotland Clapperton – Dempster – Sweeney – Weir

Edinburgh Quartet

DCD34038

Rich and personal contributions to the quartet tradition from four contemporary Scottish composing voices, ranging from the lyrical profundity of Kenneth Dempster’s meditation on a George Mackay Brown poem to a characteristically idiosyncratic and yet songful work by Judith Weir. Under leader Charles Mutter, the Edinburgh Quartet delivers blazing, committed performances celebrating the immense variety and vitality of work on offer.

Includes three world premiere recordings.

‘On this outstanding CD, driven by scorchingly focused performances from the Edinburgh Quartet, the impact of the four pieces is colossal … Each of the composers is at his and her peak, and the Edinburgh Quartet has never played better. It’s nothing less than a landmark’

– The Herald, February 2007