The ChamberMusicBox QUINTET  (London)

Shostakovich, Faure 

Saturday 25 May 2024, 7.30pm, St. Botolph’s. Concert dedicated to Roy Abrams (1929 – 2019)

Shostakovich Op. 57 Piano Quintet,
Faure Op.89 Piano Quintet.

The Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 by Dmitri Shostakovich is considered to be one of the best chamber-music masterpieces of the 20th century. Shostakovich wrote the quintet in the summer of 1940, and it was an immediate success. As one observer recalled, it “was discussed in trams, …people tried to sing in the streets the second defiant theme of the finale.” This quintet sounds like the song before the storm, with a “show must go on” feel. The latter strain of the finale is derived from a tune traditionally played at the entrance of the clowns in the Russian circus…

For Shostakovich, life as an artist in Soviet Russia was harrowing. He found himself praised one day, condemned the next, publicly humiliated and nearly arrested. His success reached its peak in 1934 with the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mzensk District, which became a sensation in Leningrad, Moscow and abroad. In 1936 Stalin attended a performance of  Lady Macbeth of the Mzensk District at the Bolshoi Theatre. Two days later an article in Pravda denounced the opera for pandering to the decadent tastes of the bourgeois West and warned, “This is a game…that may end very badly.” Shostakovich was cast down overnight to the abyss as pernicious purveyor of cultural depravity. Shaken, Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Symphony from its scheduled premiere and began the work that would redeem him: the Fifth Symphony of 1937. Three years later, as a further sign of renewed official approval, his Piano Quintet received a “category one” award, the highest level of Stalin Prize. The prize carried the sum of 100,000 rubles, an enormous sum for a chamber work. 

The quintet was a deliberate effort by Shostakovich to revive the traditional forms of the 17th and 18th centuries. The movements carry captions like “Prelude,” “Fugue,” and “Intermezzo”, with  some references to Bach, Beethoven and Haydn. Every note is clean and poised, the music moving seamlessly between the apparently light-hearted and the intensely moving. The finale is strikingly simple and powerfully memorable.

The Piano Quintet Op.89 in D minor by Gabriel Fauré is one of his finest, but probably not so very well known chamber work. This romantic and slightly melancholic quintet is dedicated to the violinist Eugène Ysaye, a friend of Fauré with whom he gave concerts in 1888 and 1889. A Belgian virtuoso violinist, Ysaÿe was touring a lot, including all of Europe, the United States and Russia, he was regarded as “The Tsar of the Violin”.