Shostakovich's String Quartets

The intimacy and privacy of the String quartet became a favoured medium for the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75). His cycle of fifteen String Quartets  may be considered equal in profundity, wit and technical brilliance to Beethoven's String 

Several of Shostakovich's quartets evoke a Kafkaesque atmosphere of anxiety, dread and fear induced by life in the Totalitarian era of Stalin. On a number of occasions he was under extreme pressure to conform to Communist Party aesthetics. nevertheless  he managed to preserve the highest degree of artistic integrity in his String Quartets in which the 'Other Shostakovich', someone quite separate from the 'Official' State War hero and composer of the patriotic  Leningrad' Symphony  is featured.

As Alex Ross notes-

'The 'other Shostakovich' was a gnomic, cryptic, secretly impassioned figure who spoke through chamber music (twelve string quartets from 1948 on) .... The string quartet became his favourite medium: it gave him the freedom to write labyrinthine narratives full of blankly winding fugues, near-motionless funeral marches, wry displays of foolish jollity, off-kilter genre exercise, and stretches of deliberate blandness. One of the composer's favourite modes might be called "dance on the gallows" - a galumphing, almost polka-like number that suggests a solitary figure facing death with inexplicable glee'.[1]

'Like the Second and Third Quartets, the Fifth begins with a sonata form movement with exposition repeat. In its virile Beethovian energy, this magnificent movement resembles the first movement of the Second Quartet, with a sense of militant resistance, which had not appeared in Shostakovich's music since that work eight years earlier, though the second subject is a graceful waltz. Segueing to its central slow movement, the quartet retreats into an icy muted B minor. ....this threnody for crushed aspirations and deformed lives also recalls the 'ghost music' of the Third Quartet'.




In contrast to Beethoven's expanding the canvas for a String Quartet, Shostakovich in his 7th String quartet (1960) telescopes the format, returning to the length of an early Haydn String Quartet.  Lasting little more than 12 minutes, the length of many single movements of a Beethoven Late quartet. It includes acerbic wit and fiercely contrasting dynamics, along with an enigmatic opening phrase.




Known in the USSR as the 'Dresden' quartet, the Eighth Quartet was composed in three days during the composer's visit to the ruined city of Dresden in July 1960...Shostakovich had supposedly been so shocked by the devastation he saw that poured out his feelings in music, inscribing the work 'In memory of the victims of fascism and war'. .....the composer told friends that, far from concerning the dead of Dresden - victims not of fascism but of Western democracy working to Soviet military request - the quartet was actually a musical autobiography. 'Everything in the quartet ais as clear as a primer. I quote Lady Macbeth the First and Fifth Symphonies. What does fascism have to do with these ? The Eight is an autobiographical  quartet, it quotes a song known to all Russians: "Exhausted by the hardships of prison".

Alex Ross notes -  'The personal motto D S C H, which sounded so pseudo-triumphantly in the finale of the Tenth Symphony, is woven into almost every page of the Eight Quartet. It appears alongside quotations, from previous Shostakovich works, including the Tenth Symphony, Lady Macbeth, and the First Symphony, not to mention Tchaikovsky's Pathetique, Siegfried's Funeral Music from Gotterdammerung, and the revolutionary song "Tormented by Grievous Bondage". .....The final pages of the score trail resemble in a curious way, the mad scene in Peter Grimes , in which the fisherman is reduced to singing his own name : "Grimes! Grimes ! Grimes!". It is the ultimate moment of self-alienation' [3]




Shostakovich and Britten

During the 1960's Shostakovich became a friend of  the composer Benjamin Britten (b. Lowestoft 1913-76). Both composers shared a liking for the music of Gustav Mahler,  both worked within the framework of Western tonality and respected each other's work sufficiently to quote each other in their respective compositions. The theme of the Outsider in society is prominent in both men's music, not least in Shostakovich's later string quartets. Both composers also died tragically prematurely. 

In his highly recommended book on 20th century music and its relationship to politics, 'The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century', the musicologist Alex Ross provides the historical details on the two composers friendship thus-

'In September 1960, when Dmitri Shostakovich came to London to hear his Cello Concerto played by Mstislav Rostropovich, he was introduced to Benjamin Britten. In the following years Britten and Pears made several visits to Russia and the friendship between the two composers blossomed when Britten and Pears traveled to A Soviet composer's colony in Armenia, where Rostropovich and Shostakovich were staying.

Ross notes -'Despite obvious differences in temperament- Britten was warm and affectionate with those whom he trusted, Shostakovich nervous to the end - the two quickly found sympathy with each other, and their connection may have gone as deep as any relationship in either man.

Britten had long admired Shostakovich's music, as the Lady Macbeth-like Passacaglia in Peter Grimes shows. Shostakovich, for his part, knew little of Britten's music before the summer of 1963, when he was sent the recording and score of the War Requiem. He promptly announced that he had encountered one of the "great works of the human spirit". In person he once said to Britten, "You great composer; I little composer". Britten's psychological landscape, with its undulating contours of fear and guilt, its fault lines and crevasses, its wan redeeming light, made Shostakovich feel at home.

Both men seem almost to have been born with a feeling of being cornered. Even in works of their teenage years, they appear to be experiencing spasms of existential dread. They were grown men with the souls of gifted, frightened children. They were like the soldiers in Wilfred Owens poem, meeting at the end of a profound, dull tunnel.

In 1969 Shostakovich capped the friendship by placing Britten's name on the title page of his Fourteenth Symphony.

Dmitri Shostakovich with Benjamin Britten

Alex Ross summarises Shostakovich's String quartets thus -

'The creations of Shostakovich's sixties, a time of increasingly deteriorating health, form a group of their own,....Here, turning away from confrontation with the State and dogged by the possibility of sudden death following his first heart attack in 1966, he focused with growing austerity on eternal and universal subjects: time, love, betrayal, truth, morality and mortality. Withdrawn and cryptic, these compositions are often compared with Beethoven's own late period. ......It  is as if  the composer has seen too much evil, suffered too much duplicity. His withdrawal from the world in his late works seems at least partly to have been founded on a growing mistrust of humanity per se. From those who knew him it seems that Shostakovich's philosophy, at its simplest, was to value the individual and fear the crowd, the heartless collective. Like Britten, he ponders in old age a kind of Noh theatre of moral parable, chiseling away the superfluous to expose the essential human beneath, bereft of its camouflage of vanity and pretence.....The desolate psychological terrain of Shostakovich's late-period music overlaps everywhere with that of Britten's. [5]

Another reviewer of Shostakovich's String Quartets states- 'The quartets are neither minor in their scope or ambition. They all have something to say about the nature of human existence and folly, collectively or as individuals. There are brief moments, more perhaps towards the later quartets, where bitterness and dark intimations of mortality give way to a peaceful acceptance.  There are no happy endings, only surrender to the inevitable, alone in the knowledge of the truth of what we are and what we have been'. [6]

 It's been suggested  that Shostakovich, faced with close scrutiny from Officials, adopted the role of the yurodivy or holy fool in his relations with the government; this persona features in his String Quartets. Austere, increasingly terse and morose, they also bear witness to the intense emotional strain the composer endured throughout his life in compliance with the Soviet authorities. Far from being exclusively expressions of the Russian Soul, they're recognisable as giving voice to the loss of Faith, alienation and existential angst suffered by many in the West in the twentieth century.

Notes

[1] The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century  Alex Ross 2007 Farrar Straus and Giroux
[2]The New Shostakovich Ian MacDonald Pimlico 2006
[3] The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century  Alex Ross 2007 Farrar Straus and Giroux
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] Anonymous Amazon reviewer.

The most detailed and scholarly online writings, far surpassing my effort, on each and every one of Shostakovich's Fifteen String Quartets can be found here. 

The Bolt

Dmitri Shostakovich's ballet The Bolt (1931) is a riveting example of experimentation in music in the Soviet Union. It was composed before the Stalinist doctrine of socialist realism restricted artistic freedom of expression. According to the musicologist Francis Maes -

The most important creative work of this period was that of Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975). Together with Myaskovsky he wrote music of lasting significance during the first Soviet period, that is, the period between 1926 - the year of his first symphony - and 1936, when the Party leadership shackled his creativity.....Shostakovich was a passionate  champion of Soviet modernism. In Shostakovich’s early work, Soviet culture received its clearest musical expression, as witness the astonishing First Symphony, the daring symphonic experiments from the Second to the Fourth Symphonies, the ballets The Golden Age, The Bolt, and The Limpid Stream, the operas The Nose and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. [1]

The one and only performance of The Bolt was on April 8th 1931. Immediately after its first performance it was banned and not performed again until 74 years later in 2005. Following its ban Shostakovich rescued material from the music score of 2 hours duration to create a condensed thirty minute concert suite. Its through the orchestral suite that the music of The Bolt (opus 27a) is known today.

The ballet's thin plot, by Viktor Smirnov, reveals why The Bolt failed to impress the critics and why it was banned. The protagonist, Lazy Idler, is a drunken lout, who upon being sacked from his factory post, seeks revenge on his employers by convincing a hapless sidekick, Goshka, to throw an enormous-sized bolt into one of the working lathes. The scheme succeeds and the lathe short-circuits. Lazy Idler points the finger of blame at an upstanding member of a team of Shock workers, Boris, but the guilt-ridden Goshka confesses to his role in the crime. Lazy Idler is detained by the factory guards, inspiring a celebration among the foreman and laborers, who cheerfully return to the production line. [2]

The musicologist Gerard McBurney stated of The Bolt - "The waspish and delightfully colourful score bowls along like a children’s cartoon-film, every number full of drama and parody and fine take-offs of serious and popular music of every kind." McBurney succinctly identifies two strong characteristics of Shostakovich's music, namely, the cinematic and the art of parody.

It was through the economic necessity of having to provide piano accompaniment to silent-films as a teenager at Leningrad cinemas that Shostakovich acquired his driving, dramatic style, so readily adaptive to the rapid action of cinema. Works such as the programmatic 11th and 12th symphonies which aurally depict the historical events leading up to the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, and the Piano Concerto no. 1 for trumpet and strings (1933) which includes rapid passages of cartoon-like humour are characteristic of Shostakovich's 'soundtrack narrative' style. But above all, it's Shostakovich's ability to mimic and parody musical styles which The Bolt is an early example of. Sarcasms, quotes and quips follow in swift succession, while the musical styles associated with jazz, folk-song, military marches and the tango, as well as the parodying of western sentimentality, are included in The Bolt.

The first and last movements of The Bolt suite reveal the full extent to which Shostakovich's mastery of orchestral technique had already developed. In the opening movement of the  suite, Beethoven's well-known 'Fate or 'Destiny' motif is quoted, only to be swiftly answered by the factory whistle. The Bolt also includes some fine examples of Shostakovich's witticisms, notably in the hilarious Drayman's Dance which celebrates the joy of alcohol and drunkenness. It is occasionally performed as an encore, including by the Russian State Symphony Orchestra following a performance of Shostakovich's 5th symphony at St. Andrew's Hall, Norwich in 2003.

Besides highlighting the taboo subject of industrial sabotage, The Bolt asks the difficult question of what's to be done with the non-conforming individual who doesn't meet official productivity quotas and fails to conform to State ideology, refusing to march to a dictated beat. There are three possible options open to Governments in the face of non-conformity, namely, ignore, integrate, or eliminate; the hallmark of a totalitarian state such as Stalin's being to eliminate.

The set designer of The Bolt, Tatiana Bruni (1902-2001) gives a valuable first-hand account of the only performance of the ballet.

At the time the dress rehearsals were open to the public at large. the theatre seemed overcrowded. As soon as the curtain opened, applause rang out, when the factory started to move, the applause transformed into an ovation that did not let up until the end of the spectacle. the dancing chapel and the individual costumes delighted the public. I swear by all that is sacred that this took place. The catcalling of the opposition (manifest philistinism!) was drowned out by the applause. But the spectacle was withdrawn. It was performed just once. We somehow became responsible for a "failure". They rebuked us in the press. I've remembered the title  of  one article. 'Bolt and chattering formalists'. Not one sketch was left to me,  some of them were destroyed in the theatre by particularly zealous "socialist realists".....We were unaware at this time art had veered sharply to the side of realism. The 'terrible'  words 'socialist realism' had appeared. [3]

Socialist realism was made the official doctrine of the Soviet Union in 1932. It was a doctrine which demanded traditional forms of representation. The Bolt, with its Constructivist leanings and bold choreography was consequently branded a failure and the director of the Mariinsky Ballet at the time, Fedor Lupukhov was forced to resign from his position.

Following the ban on The Bolt Shostakovich used subject-matter less controversial in his music, in the hope of not drawing attention to himself. He wrote a number of film scores, a genre in which he was active throughout his life. However, when in 1936 Stalin visited the theatre to hear the phenomenally popular opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk Region Shostakovich was denounced personally by Stalin. The cat-and-mouse game played between Shostakovich and Stalin is well-documented. Some of the casualties of Great Terror of Stalin's era in which many of Shostakovich's friends and relatives were imprisoned or killed include -  his patron Marshal Tukhachevsky (shot months after his arrest); his brother-in-law Vsevolod Frederiks (who was eventually released but died before he got home); his close friend Nikolai Zhilyayev (a musicologist who had taught Tukhachevsky; shot shortly after his arrest); his mother-in-law, the astronomer Sofiya Mikhaylovna Varzar (sent to a camp in Karaganda); his friend the Marxist writer Galina Serebryakova who served 20 years in camps; his uncle Maxim Kostrykin (died); and his colleagues Boris Kornilov and Adrian Piotrovsky, both of whom were executed.

Shostakovich's response to his denunciation resulted in his profound and monumental 5th symphony in D minor  op.47 (1937) which carries the title A Soviet artist's response to just criticism.  According to Wikipedia -

During the first performance of the symphony, people were reported to have wept during the Largo movement. The music, steeped in an atmosphere of mourning, contained echoes of the panikhida, the Russian Orthodox requiem. It also recalled a genre of Russian symphonic works written in memory of the dead, including pieces by Glazunov, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky. For an audience that had lost friends and family on a massive scale, these references were apt to evoke intense emotions. This was why the Fifth Symphony was received and cherished by the Soviet public unlike any other work as an expression of the immeasurable grief they endured during Stalin's regime.

Shostakovich wrote music for one more ballet, The Limpid Stream in 1936. The genre was left open to development by  the home-sick and somewhat politically naive Sergei Prokofiev upon his return to Russia to create what remains the most well-known and loved of Soviet ballets, the traditional in style, Romeo and Juliet (1940). But it is Shostakovich's The Bolt which epitomizes the hope and optimism experienced by many Russians in creating a new, fairer society in the early years of the Soviet Union's history.

Coincidentally there is, until the end of February, an exhibition of costumes, designs and photographs of the first production of The Bolt at the Gallery for Russian Arts and Design ( GRAD ) based in London.

Notes

[1] Maes, Francis; Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans (translators) (2002) A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

[2] Simon Morrison's notes to the Bel Air 2006 DVD production of The Bolt
[3] Ibid.
[4]  New York Times review of 'The Bolt' and GRAD exhibition

Benjamin Britten

Today is the feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, and also the birthday of the English composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976).

Throughout next year there will be a multitude of performances and analysis of Britten’s music, including a nation-wide project involving over 75,000 school-children who will be coordinated to sing simultaneously on his birthday. There's even to be a 50 pence coin issued in 2013 with a portrait of Britten on its reverse, such will be the high-profile centenary celebrations of arguably, the greatest British composer since Henry Purcell (1659-1695).

With its close geographical proximity to Lowestoft, the east coast town where Britten was born, Norwich and its rich musical heritage played no small part in Benjamin Britten’s musical development. The city is home to England's oldest music festival and several early musical compositions by Britten were premièred there.  

Benjamin Britten exhibited all the traits associated with a child prodigy. He had his first piano lessons aged four and began writing music aged five, nurtured by his mother’s amateur talent. Such was young Britten’s musical precocity that he was soon acquiring and studying orchestral scores of major works of classical music. His viola teacher, Audrey Alston who played in the Norwich Quartet, obtained tickets for him to hear the Ravel string quartet in Norwich as well as the Beethoven E minor (opus 59 no. 2) which the ten-year old school-boy described as ‘absolutely ripping’. More importantly, Audrey Alston also chaperoned the budding composer to a concert in October 1924, at the Norfolk and Norwich Triennial Festival, to hear Frank Bridge conducting his orchestral suite The Sea (1911). Britten, aged ten, latter described himself as being ‘knocked sideways’ upon hearing the music of his future teacher and mentor. Audrey Alston subsequently introduced her pupil to Frank Bridge (1879-1941) and the young composer later took lessons from him. Britten's first published work, Sinfonietta (1932) is dedicated to his mentor, Variations on a theme of Frank Bridge (1937) written for string orchestra and the Four Sea Interludes which intersperse the action of the opera Peter Grimes (1945) are compositions which pays homage to his influential music-teacher. 

Like his mentor, Britten rejected the 'Little Englander' perspective of Elgar and Vaughan Williams in favour of mainstream continental influences. Much of Britten's music is a fine equilibrium between the influence of more progressive European composers such as Mahler, Berg, Bartok, and Stravinsky, counter-balanced with the best of the tradition of English music-making, an aesthetic choice which has reaped dividends for his musical legacy. 

Britten’s musical genius developed in 1930 with his A Hymn to the Virgin a choral work composed when convalescing from an illness at Gresham’s Public School in North Norfolk. During his boarding at Gresham's there must also have been occasions when the young school-boy passed through Norwich when returning home to Lowestoft during the school holidays, or visited the city to purchase one of the many 78 r.p.m. shellac discs or orchestral scores which he avidly collected throughout his life. A Hymn to the Virgin was first performed in January 1931 at the church of Saint John's, Lowestoft. Many years later, Britten wrote Hymn to Saint Peter (op.55) for the quincentenary anniversary of the church of Saint Peter Mancroft at Norwich.  C.J.R.Coleman, who had been organist at St. John’s Lowestoft in the 1930's, was by 1955, organist at Saint Peter Mancroft at Norwich. Coleman and his son, with young Benjamin and his father, had made music together during Britten's childhood. Britten held a deep attachment to memories of his youth, and the composition for St.Peter's was, like several others, written in gratitude for early encouragement from his mentors.

With the opportunity to enlist at the Royal School of Music in 1931, Britten’s knowledge of music, through study and attendance at concerts in London developed considerably. Upon completion of his studies at the R.C.M. he was however dissuaded from travelling to Vienna in order to study composition further under the tuition of Alan Berg. However, sometime in 1932 Britten met another composer he also admired, Arnold Schoenberg.  

Britten returned to Norwich to conduct the first performance of his Simple Symphony for string orchestra in 1934. Recycling and re-arranging various juvenile compositions, nearly all of which were written between the young age of nine to twelve, Simple Symphony indulges in youthful humour, heavily hinted in each movement's titles- Boisterous Bouree, Playful Pizzicato, Sentimental Serenade and Frolicsome Finale. It was dedicated to his viola teacher, Audrey Alston. Britten's first fully professional engagement however was in 1936 at the Norwich Festival, where he conducted the première of his song-cycle for soloist and orchestra Our Hunting Fathers. It features a dominant theme in Britten's music, mankind's inhumanity. In the first of Britten's many song-cycles, it is cruelty towards animals and the barbaric blood sport of hunting, as its title suggests, which is strongly condemned. The libretto of Our Hunting Fathers was supplied by the poet W. H. Auden. The work is startling modern, influenced by the lieder of Mahler. 

Britten travelled to America in 1939, however his sojourn in America was short-lived, he soon became home-sick and returned to England in 1942. The sea is a big theme in Britten's music , its featured prominently in Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and Death in Venice, but it was while actually at  at sea, in the cramped conditions of a cabin, avoiding ice-bergs and U-Boats on the way, that  Britten composed A Ceremony of Carols. Written for boy's choir and harp, each of the nine poignant medieval carols besides being technically demanding, has a magical innocence and a winter-like atmosphere rarely  evoked in English music. A Ceremony of Carols was first performed in Norwich during the darkest days of World War II, December 1942. Since its first performance A Ceremony of Carols has become one of the most recorded of all Britten's works and dozens of recordings are currently available of one of his most popular works and continues to be performed at Advent at Saint Peter's, Mancroft, Norwich. 

Britten’s great international success came in 1945 with the opera Peter Grimes, a work which brought the composer world-wide fame and which single-handedly re-invented English opera. Peter Grimes is the first of several operas by Britten which explore the theme of the individual who suffers from social prejudice. With his life-long pacifism (he registered as a conscientious objector upon returning to England  from America in 1942) Britten could easily relate to the plight of the outsider who is castigated by society. The central character of Albert Herring, Billy Budd, Owen Wingrave and Death in Venice explores the relationship and conflict between the outsider and society, each in quite different ways.

In addition to his anti-war beliefs, Britten’s open relationship with the tenor Peter Pears (1910-1986) his partner for almost forty years, also caused him to be the subject of prejudice (homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967). In reality however, Britten and Pears relationship is a love story which is testimony to love enduring in the face of, at times, intense social prejudice. Britten wrote some of his finest music with the voice of Peter Pears in mind and the musical sensibilities of both Pears and Britten were considerably enhanced in their mutual artistic support to each other. Together they established the world-renowned Aldeburgh music festival, settling permanently in the Suffolk coastal town from 1947 until Britten's death in 1976.

Britten’s association with Norwich continued when he included the ancient, medieval city as a setting of one of the acts of his opera Gloriana. Written as part of the celebrations for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, Britten's opera features a visit made by Queen Elizabeth I to the city in 1578. Act Two of Gloriana is set against the back-drop of the the flint-knapped Guildhall at Norwich. Elizabeth I is welcomed by the City Recorder, a masque is performed which she and the Royal court watch. In total six dances, including a Morris dance are performed. Personifications of Time and Concord are among the principle characters in a masque which, accompanied by a chorus of rustic country maids and fishermen, concludes the entertainment with a homage to the Queen.

Biographical details of Britten’s life reveal the fact that there was hardly a single year of his life in which he was not ill, often quite seriously, and towards the end of life, fatally, nor is there hardly a single year in his life in which he did not travel extensively abroad. He often combined a holiday with performing, accompanying his life-time partner Peter Pears in song-recitals on the piano. He visited what was the Soviet Union no less than seven times, becoming a close friend of the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, his wife, the mezzo-soprano Galina Vishnevskaya and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who once said to him in broken English, ‘You great composer, I little composer’. Rostropovich and Britten's music-making is now legendary and Britten wrote more music for the Russian cellist than any other musician other than Pears. His friendship with Shostakovich was also rather special by all accounts. Shostakovich gave Britten gifts of recordings of his symphonies, while towards the end of his life Britten granted Shostakovich a private view of his work-in-progress score of his last opera Death in Venice, a rare and intimate gesture which he granted to few.

One of Britten’s most distinguished musical admirers wrote in her diary for 1970 -

‘The record of Les Illuminations has arrived and Ruth & I have played it several times, & listened with the greatest joy. There is no sound here except the shushing of the sea & the crying of the seabirds, & this music is exactly right for the atmosphere here of sea & sky & silence. I find it extraordinary moving’. 

Britten’s admirer was Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (1900-2002). Although in the 1930's Britten held communist sympathies, in common with many artists in the 1930's, his relationship with the Royal family, in particular with  the Queen Mother developed throughout the decades of 60's and early 70's into a respectful relationship. Britten and Pears not only performed at the Royal Estate of Sandringham in Norfolk, but Britten became the first composer to ever be awarded the honour of Life-Peer. 

Britten was no musical elitist and much of his music is arranged for the ease of amateur performance. While he admitted to no personal liking for pop music he nevertheless kept abreast of the latest developments in English music, stating in 1968 - 

Everything I read about the Beatles gives me pleasure. They have a wit and they have a directness – a freshness of approach which gives me a great pleasure, and I also think they are frightfully funny. 

and a copy of the Beatles long-playing vinyl disc A Hard Day's Night (1964) is listed as once in Britten's vast record collection.

Britten had an innate ear for literary texts to set to music and was one of the 20th century’s most well-read composers. His first opera was based upon the poetry of fellow Suffolk artist, George Crabbe. Other notable literary figures Britten set to music include Rimbaud, Keats, Blake, Shakespeare, Henry James, Herman Melville and W.H.Auden with whom he collaborated on a number of occasions.

Like many school-children I was disinclined from listening to Benjamin Britten’s music after over-exposure to his pedagogic Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. His music struck me as traditional and conservative in nature and there seemed to be more interesting music to discover and explore; my favourite British contemporary music L.P recording as a teenager Michael Tippett's Concerto for Double-string Orchestra (1936) and Symphony no.2 (1953); however in 1973, during what was one of the last rehearsals for a performance of  Britten's Church parable Noyes Fludde as part of what was the Norfolk and Norwich Triennial Festival (now the N&N Festival) a sudden hush fell upon the rehearsal at Saint Andrew's Hall, a surprise visitor had arrived, the composer himself had called to thank all the boys and girls for their hard work rehearsing. The photo at the top of this post is how I remember him. The photo below is of Britten wearing his school cricket blazer and cap, aged circa 13.

I've only covered a brief review of Britten's music up to the international success of his opera Peter Grimes in this post. Rather than waste any more of the reader's time, and far more informative on Britten than words, is my exhortation to seek out and hear Britten's music. A large percentage of it is vocal, choral or operatic, while the themes of the Sea, the social outcast, innocence betrayed and Man's inhumanity to man are often encountered, especially in his operas. The Britten 100 web-page allows the  new listener to the composer's music to select samples by  genre, mood, instrument and tempo. Here's a brief list of Britten's music which I've found rewarding and recommend hearing.

Peter Grimes
Four Sea Interludes
Pasacaglia op.33b
Simple Symphony
Violin Concerto
Piano Concerto
Serenade for horn, strings and tenor
String Quartets 2 and 3
Prince of the Pagodas
A Ceremony of Carols

Books consulted

The Faber Pocket Guide to Britten - John Bridcut pub. Faber & Faber 2010
An accessible book, full of facts, insights and trivia about Britten.
Highly recommended

Benjamin Britten by Michael Oliver pub. Phaidon Press 1996

Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich 1906-1975

Last night I attended a concert at Saint Andrew's Hall, Norwich. The Moscow State Symphony Orchestra performed the following - Borodin Polovtsian Dances, Philip Glass violin Concerto and Shostakovich Symphony no. 10 in E minor.

The Borodin Polovtsian Dance's were electric and boded well for the rest of the programme. One catches an aural glimpse in its vibrant savagery of another musical work also set in early Rus, namely Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. As for the Concerto well to be honest, although I've been a keen follower of the music of Philip Glass for over 20 years, i don't consider his violin concerto (1988) to be the best or most representative composition of his unique style. The young violinist Chloe Hanslip did her best, but still felt obliged to add a couple of solo encores to prove her undoubted virtuosity. Nor did one feel that the Russian orchestra felt completely at home or responsive to Glass's composition, but this may be just an erroneous perception of mine.

Onto more solid interpretative ground. The second half on the concert consisted of Shostakovitch's symphony no. 10. A vast and mostly gloomy work composed in 1953 soon after Stalin's death. It's only in the last movement that the composer lets his hair down for some jollity. How many times in varied ways does the motif D-S-C-H occur throughout the score? The composer used this musical motif throughout his artistic career to represent himself, the notes being the first letter of his name and first three of his surname in Russian musical notation. The playing throughout the symphony was committed and impassioned, a real tour-de-force. I'm always amazed at the virtuosity of Russian brass and woodwind playing and how united the string section are.

The 10th symphony remains one of the more accessible of Shostakovich's symphonies with a quite distinctive tonality, perhaps because it is in the remote key of E minor. Gloomy as it is a cathartic redemption is arrived at, otherwise such works would never be performed in the Concert-Hall, the audience leaving more depressed than when they arrived!

In some ways Shostakovich's music has finally arrived on the world-stage now that he can be listened to without any political coloration. I've been acquainted with the 10th symphony since I was 14, partly due to a reactionary passion to listen to 'the enemies' music during the 1970's cold war. A music teacher used to discreetly place records such as Shostakovich Symphony no. 5 on the turn-table while the school chess team played. A captive listening audience if ever there was, Chess enjoying something of a Renaissance among school-boys, it was after all during the great tournament between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. in 1972 between the maverick Bobby Fischer and Spassky! The 5th symphony soon became a firm favourite of mine, but I also remember hearing the World premiere of the 15th symphony albeit on a tinny transistor radio.

Although Shostakovich grew up under the Soviet regime and is easily the most representative composer of the Soviet era, for a hardened atheist there are a remarkable number of mystical or numinous passages to be found in his music. One of the most extraordinary of all his symphonic output is the mysterious percussive scherzo to the 15th Symphony.

Here's a link to read more about Shostakovich