The Department of Music in Arts & Sciences will mark the centennial year of the birth of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) with a concert that includes several of his most popular chamber works.
The performance begins at 7 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 15, in Whitaker Hall Auditorium. The concert is free and open to the public.
The program will feature Shostakovich’s “Cello Sonata in D minor, op. 40”; “Piano Quintet in G minor, op. 57”; and two scenes from the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. All were written between 1930 and 1940 — a period that brought great acclaim and great turbulence to the composer’s professional life.
Shostakovich began composing Lady Macbeth, based on a novella by Nikolai Leskov, in 1930. It tells the story of Katerina Ismailova, a neglected wife trapped in a destructive marriage to a provincial merchant, who is driven to murder her husband.
Simultaneous premieres took place in Moscow and Leningrad in 1934 and brought the composer much critical praise.
However, in 1936 an article titled “Muddle Instead of Music”— allegedly written by Stalin himself — appeared in Pravda. It labeled Shostakovich’s work as vulgar and cacophonous and threatened that things “could go very badly” if the composer did not change his ways.
Shostakovich appeared before the Composers’ Union in Moscow, where he was labeled a “bourgeois aesthete and formalist.”
Yet his response to the criticism remains controversial to this day, as scholars continue to assess whether the composer took “corrective” measures in his music or whether he veiled sarcastic retorts in music too subtle for Stalin’s regime to discern.
Mezzo soprano Noël Prince, instructor in voice, will perform two monologues from Lady Macbeth as well as a pair of early songs, “The Cricket and the Ant” and “The Ass and the Nightingale.” Accompanying Prince will be pianist Hugh Macdonald, Ph.D., the Avis H. Blewett Professor of Music, who prepared English translations of the texts.
The “Cello Sonata,” composed shortly after the premiere of Lady Macbeth, contains charming pastoral references and melodic elements reflective of the late Romantic period, though the final two movements also contain a darkness and sarcasm that tints much of Shostakovich’s work. Performers are Hugh Macdonald and cellist Elizabeth Macdonald, director of strings.
The final work on the concert, the “Piano Quintet,” was written in 1940 and enjoyed great popularity, despite being marked by a sense of satire and irony. Still, in 1941 the “Quintet” won the Stalin Prize, thus further distorting perceptions about the composer’s relationship to the Soviet dictator.
Pianist for the quintet is Seth Carlin, professor of music. Also featured are Elizabeth Macdonald and three members of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra: violist Mike Chen and violinists Dana Myers and Charlene Clark.
For more information, call 935-4841 or e-mail staylor@wustl.edu.