Jerusalem Quartet plays Shostakovich

It's been a relatively dry season locally for Shostakovich's chamber music, but the Jerusalem Quartet made splendid amends with its recital at the Seaport Museum. Three of his mid-period quartets comprised the program, separated by a span of 15 years but stylistically congruent. The major difference— always a backdrop to Shostakovich— was the political circumstances in which they were composed.

The Fourth Quartet, Op. 83, was written in 1949, a year after the infamous denunciation of "formalism" in music at the Soviet Composers Union Congress. Stalin didn't like music he couldn't hum, and he had a notoriously defective ear.

A larger point was being made too, of course: that there would be no political or cultural liberalization in the wake of World War II, when Communist dogmatics had been muted on behalf of national mobilization in a grim struggle for survival. Composers would write music to inspire or divert the masses in the task of reconstruction, not to give them pause for thought. It was like asking Picasso to stick to comic strips.

Shostakovich, too, would be compelled to produce such propaganda fodder as The Sun Shines Over Our Motherland, but he continued to compose works "for the drawer." They included the Violin Concerto, Op. 77, the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, Op. 79, and the 24 Preludes and Fugues for Piano, Op. 87, as well as the Fourth Quartet.

No Jewish lineage, but….

There was no assurance when or even if these works could ever be publicly performed; they were written for Shostakovich's most intimate circle, for posterity if need be, and for the composer himself: the caged nightingale had to sing. Nonetheless, these works were acts of great moral courage.

The Fourth Quartet begins with a drone-like theme that, especially in the hands of the Jerusalem Quartet, displays a decidedly Jewish character. Shostakovich's identification with Jewish music was at its height in the 1940s, most overtly in the Jewish Folk Poetry cycle but also in the Piano Trio, Op. 67, which was dedicated to the memory of his closest friend, the Jewish musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky.

So close was Shostakovich's identification with Jewish cultural expression and with the Jew as an icon of human suffering that one critical study of him is even entitled "Shostakovich the Jew," although the composer had no Jewish lineage. Alexander Pavlovsky, the Jerusalem's first violinist, brought out the Jewish quality of the main theme of the Finale so plangently that he seemed almost to step out of a Chagall canvas.

Altogether, this was a revelatory performance for me, despite a broken bow strand that briefly stopped the proceedings and a slightly too detached bowing in the work's massive climax.

Khrushchev's thaw

The Ninth Quartet, begun in 1961, wasn't completed until 1964, but the Tenth Quartet followed it almost immediately in that same year. These were the latter years of what the writer Ilya Ehrenburg dubbed "The Thaw," which began with Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin before the Twentieth Party Congress and ended with his overthrow eight years later in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It was the era of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Van Cliburn's triumph in the Moscow Tchaikovsky competition, and of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's commemoration of the 1941 Nazi massacre of Jews in his "Babi Yar," the Soviet Union's first overt recognition of the Holocaust. (Shostakovich immediately set the poem as the first movement of his Thirteenth Symphony.)

The relatively greater openness of these years had little effect on Shostakovich's music, which if anything assumed an even more tragic character in his Eleventh Symphony and Eighth Quartet; and the savage scherzo of the Tenth Quartet, Allegretto furioso, may be the rawest piece of music he ever wrote.

Violent climax

A deceptively ruminative Andante con moto leads into it, and a lovely Adagio emerges on the other side that moves without break into the extended finale, whose climax violently transforms the opening material of the quartet. There's a certain structural similarity to the Fourth Quartet, and both works drift off quietly at the end. The Jerusalem was flawless here.

The Ninth Quartet belonged, as it came, at the end of the recital. It's nearly half an hour in length and symphonic in scope, and it also features an extended finale, though one that drives to a furious close. The opening of the work is also dronelike, and, as in the Fourth and Tenth quartets, the first movement is deceptively muted in tone.

Near the end of the score, a passage anticipates the finale of the Tenth; but then, these middle period quartets, however individual and distinct, seem part of a single great discourse even where they don't, as in the Eighth Quartet, resort to deliberate self-quotation.

The Ninth and Tenth quartets mark the end of the cycle; with the Eleventh Quartet, completed in early 1966, Shostakovich abruptly entered his late phase, when his mood turned deeply introspective, his textures thinned, and the silence he felt awaiting him became as integral to his music as the notes themselves.

20th Century's greatest

The Beethoven and Borodin Quartets are authoritative in ways no one else can be (several of their members were personal dedicatees of the music), but the Jerusalem Quartet is as good as any group now performing Shostakovich, and from their playing here they are to be preferred to the Emerson Quartet, which has great energy but can lack refinement. Pavlovsky's tone in particular is a wonder, but his colleagues are all first-rate as well.

As Bernard Jacobson notes, "No composer can claim a firmer place in the annals of the string quartet in the 20th Century than Shostakovich." Yet the composer didn't seriously engage the string quartet form until his late 30s, when he had already completed his first eight symphonies.

At that point, and for some time after, the six Bartok quartets held pride of place in the modern repertoire, of which they certainly remain a cornerstone. But perhaps no single body of work tells the story of the century both men shared as does the Shostakovich quartet cycle.

Approaching three of them in the same evening is a work of psychic and emotional no less than physical stamina. The Jerusalem Quartet had what it took.♦


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