Join us as we feature Columbus’s own Caroline Hong on the energetic and virtuosic Prokofiev’s 3rd piano concerto, paired with the Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony.

In compliance with state and city health protocols, only 300 seats will be allowed per night. Your assigned seat will be available at will call in the main entrance of the Ohio Theatre on the night of the concert. Each concert is approximately one-hour with no intermission.

We look forward to seeing you in-person for this exclusive opportunity! But if you are unable to attend the performance, please watch the virtual concert in our free digital series An Evening with the Symphony: The Masterworks. The Russian Winter Festival II concert will be available to stream on February 5, 2021 at 7:30 pm at columbussymphony.com.

Program:
Shostakovich: Chamber Symphony, op. 73a
Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No.3

Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26 (1921)
by Sergei Prokofiev (Sontsovka, Ukraine, 1891 – Moscow, 1953)

Six months after the October Revolution of 1917, 27-year-old Sergei Prokofiev left Russia for the United States.  Already famous in his homeland as the enfant terrible of modern music, a controversial composer and a pianist of dazzling virtuosity, he was eager to make a name for himself in the West as well.

His efforts to succeed in America, however, were only half successful.  His first New York recital, on November 20, 1918, had positive reviews.  His opera The Love of Three Oranges, however, was not well received in Chicago, with the critics treating Prokofiev as a Bolshevist barbarian let loose on the peaceful American shores.  As a result, Prokofiev soon decided to make Western Europe his home base instead of the United States, although his concert tours in this country continued until 1938.

In the summer of 1921, Prokofiev retreated to a small village on the coast of Brittany in Northern France to work on what in his autobiography he called “a large virtuoso concerto.”  His first two concertos, written in Russia, had been iconoclastic works that gave rise to heated debates.  This time, Prokofiev created a more Classical piece, one that he hoped would help establish him in the West.  He incorporated many elements of Classical sonata form such as the transformation and recapitulations of contrasting themes, but his “spicy” harmonies are very much those of the “Roaring Twenties.”  Most of the concerto’s thematic material derives from earlier works and sketches that had accumulated over a ten-year period; yet in its final form the concerto is remarkably unified in style and mood. 

The first movement is an exciting amalgam of rambunctious humor, romantic sensitivity and dazzling virtuosity, all masterfully combined to form a cohesive musical statement. 

Next comes a theme with five variations that stands as the concerto's slow movement, although three of the variations are rather fast in tempo.  These three (variations nos. 2, 3, and 5) exploit the beautiful lyrical theme more for its rhythmic than for its melodic potential.  The other two are more delicate, filled with exciting chromatic harmonies.  The last variation turns the theme into a march of sorts, but the coda suddenly reverts to the lyrical ambiance of the slow variations.

The third-movement finale is brisk and vigorous.  It has an extended middle section in a slower tempo that abounds in special orchestration effects (oboes doubling the clarinets below, not above as usual; the cello section playing the melody in an extremely high register, etc.)  The middle section has its own middle section where the piano, suddenly switching from 3/4 to 4/4 time, plays a simple melody based on a single note.  The dynamic material that opened the movement returns for a vivacious ending.

Chamber Symphony, Op. 110A
arranged in 1967 by Rudolf Barshai (Stanitsa Labinskaya, Russia, 1924 – Basel, Switzerland, 2010) after the String Quartet No. 8 (1960)
by Dmitri Shostakovich (St. Petersburg, 1906 – Moscow, 1975)

The Eighth is by far the best-known of Shostakovich's fifteen string quartets.  Its special status is due to the fact that it is generally considered—indeed, it was intended—as an autobiographical work.  It uses several quotes from earlier works by the composer, and uses the “D-S-C-H” theme—Shostakovich's musical initials—prominently throughout the work.  Using the German spelling Dmitri Schostakowitsch and the German names for the notes (S—or es—stands for E-flat and H for B-natural), the composer came up with the sequence D—E-flat—C—B, which happens to yield not just any kind of melody but a very poignant one.  The diminished fourth between the E-flat and the B-natural is the source of great dramatic tension, as it was already in the theme of Bach's fugue in C-sharp minor from the first book of The Well-Tempered Keyboard.  “D-S-C-H” is a very close variant of Bach's C-sharp—B-sharp—E—D-sharp.  It also bears a strong resemblance to the B-A-C-H motif, which Bach had derived from his name (B-flat—A—C—B-natural).  Before the Eighth Quartet, Shostakovich had already used the D-S-C-H theme in other works, most notably in his Tenth Symphony (1953).  Yet in the quartet he was positively obsessed with it—and for many years, it wasn't entirely clear why.

The fullest account of what happened in the summer of 1960 can be read in the commentaries written by Isaak Glikman, one of Shostakovich's closest friends, to the letters he had received from the composer (published in English as Story of a Friendship in 2001).  To make a long story short, Shostakovich had been coerced to join the Communist Party, and he finally gave in to the enormous pressure that was placed on him.  He was a nervous wreck as a result of the entire ordeal.  Soon afterwards, he travelled to East Germany, and composed the Eighth Quartet at a spa in the area known as “the Switzerland of Saxony.”  Though he ostensibly dedicated the quartet “in memory of the victims of fascism and war,” his private thoughts, revealed only to Glikman, were quite different:

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.  The title page could carry the dedication:  “To the memory of the composer of this quartet.”

So this is why the work opens with a gloomy fugue on the D-S-C-H subject, soon followed by a heart-rending lament.  This is why the second movement is a brutally fierce scherzo, almost a danse macabre, depicting a lifetime spent in the shadow of war, oppression and the Gulag.  At the climactic moment of this movement, the playful theme from the finale of Shostakovich's Second Piano Trio (1944) appears but here it doesn't sound playful at all but positively frightening.  And thereby hangs another tale.  This theme is strikingly Jewish in its melodic inflections and its rhythm:  one could imagine hearing it played by a klezmer band.  Deeply grieving for the Jews murdered during World War II, Shostakovich adopted a “Jewish style” in many of his works from the 1940s on.  At the time of Stalin's vigorous anti-Semitic campaign, such overt Jewish references carried a particular message, one that was too dangerous to put into words but could be conveyed effectively in music.

The quartet continues with a more light-hearted movement in which the D-S-C-H melody is transformed into a waltz.  The recall of the opening of the recent First Cello Concerto (1959), an unqualified triumph for the composer, seems to signify the arrival of happier times (in spite of occasional dark spots in the harmony).  Other quotes, throughout the quartet, commemorate important milestones in Shostakovich's career, such as the First Symphony, which catapulted him to world fame at the age of 19, or the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which was violently and life-threateningly denounced by the Party.

Soon we are plunged into the depths of despair once more:  against a background of powerful dramatic accents, the fourth-movement Largo features the revolutionary sond Zamúchen tyashóloy nevóley (“Tormented by Grievous Bondage”), well known to every Russian, in a complex and multi-layered web of musical and extra-musical associations.  This is a song praising Lenin for freeing his people from the “grievous bondage,” but it is quoted here not so much for the message of liberation as for the depiction of bondage itself—and certainly also because it is, regardless of its text, a beautiful, brooding melody with a strong and authentic Russian flavor.

The quartet ends with a fifth movement that returns to the tempo and character of the first:  a slow fugue on the D-S-C-H theme, where we may imagine Shostakovich contemplating the turmoil of his life in solitude and resignation.

Without a doubt, the Eighth Quartet is a deeply moving, tragic work.  Yet Shostakovich was always ready to poke cruel fun at himself.  In the letter to Glikman quoted above, he refers to the Eighth as an “ideologically flawed quartet which is of no use to anybody” (he said this because the work failed to deliver the kid of “hurrah” optimism the authorities wished for).  The various quotes in the work make it “quite a nice hodge-podge, really.”  And Shostakovich caps it all by saying:  “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 half-a-dozen beers.”  Tragedy and satire are often inseparable in Shostakovich, as they are in his beloved Gogol.  Their joint power gave the composer a chance of survival in the face of the most “grievous bondage” any great artist ever had to endure. 

 In 1967, the conductor Rudolf Barshai arranged this quartet for string orchestra, with the composer's approval; this new version of the work was published under the title “Chamber Symphony.”

Peter Laki