Shostakovich performance vibrant with theatricality

By Y. Bintang Prakarsa

JAKARTA (JP): Russian composers are under-represented in Jakarta classical programs, therefore a Shostakovich performance by two marvelous young musicians last Tuesday (May 23) at Erasmus Huis was most welcome. Before an engrossed audience, cellist Quirine Viersen and pianist Silke Avenhaus revealed the dry sarcasm of Shostakovich's celebrated and much-performed Sonata for Cello and Piano in D minor.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was controversial during and, above all, after his life. Until four years after his death, he was viewed as a composer that had dutifully served the Soviet state. He never challenged the state publicly and never protested when his fellow intellectuals were incarcerated or exiled as a result of their dissidence -- which made many of them bitter toward him. He was recognized both by the Soviet government and its opponents at home and abroad as its foremost composer and a loyal citizen of the communist state -- an image that was duly accepted in the West.

In 1979 a book appeared that ignited a debate that is still blazing: Testimony: the Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich edited by Solomon Volkov, and now already in its sixth edition. The original manuscript was smuggled from the USSR to the USA, translated from Russian into English, and published for the first time by Harper & Row.

This book portrays Shostakovich as a silent dissident who expressed his protests in his compositions. The apparent sound of his music actually conceals codes that convey his real intentions -- that of dissent and ridicule of the oppressive Soviet system.

The Soviet government was naturally quick to condemn what they saw as a hoax. The Western public, used to the government- approved picture of Shostakovich, was divided. Thus began a battle between the "revisionists" (those who like to alter the image of Shostakovich from a submissive coward into a closet nonconformist) and the "antirevisionists" (those who want to stick with his former image).

The problem stems from the authenticity of the testimony in the book. The opening up of Russia after the fall of the Communists has made the dispute even more acrimonious, now that both parties can garner conflicting firsthand accounts from surviving acquaintances and relatives.

Antirevisionists are wary of the book's intention. They see it as a last attempt by the composer (or his editor) to explain away Shostakovich's complicity in the Soviet projects and his failure to voice protests during his life. They do not believe that certain musical passages could be hiding meanings that at times contradict the obvious sonic effect of the music (a happy piece of music is not supposed to be happy).

On the other hand, revisionists insist that the book -- corroborated by a more recent book of reminiscences by Shostakovich's relatives and acquaintances collected by Elizabeth Wilson -- is reliable, even if it does not have word-for-word authenticity. As for the hidden meaning, they point out that it was usual for oppressed people in the USSR to use a doublespeak that had two meanings, the overt and the covert.

The antirevisionists, they say, are oblivious to Soviet cultural and political conditions.

Like Viersen and Avenhaus, who sensed Shostakovich's bitterness in the cello sonata, I believe that a revisionist insight helps in making sense of his music. Premiered in 1934 in Leningrad with the composer himself on the piano, this sonata came from the years when Stalin was wrestling to secure his position as a virtual dictator of the Soviet Union.

It was already the years of misery for the Soviet people, especially the peasants, who, since 1928, had had to endure a collectivization program that had turned their lands to state- owned production units designed to support an instant, massive industrialization program.

Millions were literally starved to death. In 1934, Stalin turned to civil and military officers and intellectuals: the infamous purge, which was to last through 1938, and to result in mass imprisonments, exiles and executions.

Like his senior Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), he reacted with sarcasm to the whole repressive air of Stalinist rule. The whole sonata is a mockery on many levels. First, it parodies classical forms -- Mozart's or Haydn's vehicle for elegance, humor and proportion.

The first movement starts with a deceptively graceful passage, but it is not long before the sound turns murky and sour. The grotesque, angular lines of the second movement at once caricature classical scherzo and Russian folk melodies -- here, what Shostakovich refers to might not be unruly peasants but the brutal politicians of the Soviet regime. Dominated by repetitive note patterns, the seemingly calm, slow third movement is far from restful.

The sprightly opening of the fourth movement recalls the typical joking and teasing of, perhaps, a Haydn final movement, but soon it becomes a violent turmoil. In the middle of the movement, the ridiculousness becomes starkly exposed when the piano and cello exchange in a rapid passage that repeats obdurate patterns over and over. The choice of tempo by Viersen and Avenhaus -- on the fast side of Allegretto -- made Shostakovich's characteristic repetitiousness sound even more silly.

The prize-winning Viersen and her partner for three years Avenhaus played an elegant early Beethoven and a heroic Chopin piece as well, their vast expressive vocabulary doing justice to each of them. But it was in their Shostakovich that their dramatic ventures worked so well, complemented with subtlety in phrasing, bowing, and other details such as the use of nonvibrato in certain passages. With their hands, this demanding work became vibrant with all its fantastic theatricality.