Georgian composer Igor Loboda wrote his poignant Requiem as an encore piece for violinist Lisa Batiashvili, who gave the premiere in Berlin’s Philharmonie on June 20, 2014. Three months later, Ms. Batiashvili made headlines when she encored the work as a protest at the close of a concert with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra led by Valery Gergiev, a prominent apologist for Russia’s military incursions in Ukraine and Georgia. Requiem is a short meditation on a Ukrainian folk song whose title translates as “The Broad River Dnieper Roars and Moans.” After a strenuous workout, the music dies away in a slow, measured pizzicato that evokes the ceaseless motion of the river’s current.
Weinberg’s vast catalog of works includes no fewer than 26 symphonies, 17 string quartets, and more than 40 film scores. The Polish-born composer cut his musical teeth before World War II in Warsaw’s popular Yiddish theaters. After fleeing to Russia in 1939, he eked out a living composing stage and circus music during periods when he fell out of favor with the Soviet authorities. His music interweaves a mildly dissonant but stubbornly tonal contemporary idiom with elements drawn from traditional Jewish and Slavic music. This pungent stylistic potpourri invites comparisons to Shostakovich, Weinberg’s longtime friend and artistic confidant.
Written over a span of nearly four decades, Weinberg’s six sonatas for violin and piano reflect the early influence of his violinist father, as well as his mature friendships with Leonid Kogan and David Oistrakh. Although the Fourth Sonata of 1947 begins and ends in serene F major, it’s hardly the kind of uplifting, optimistic music for the masses dictated by the official Soviet policy of socialist realism. A pronounced streak of fatalism runs through Weinberg’s work, which is characterized by obsessive repetition, rhythmic vigor, and sharp contrasts of mood and register. The three movements are played without a break. A somber, meditative Adagio segues to a manically energetic Allegro, equal parts hoedown and dance of death. A bravura violin cadenza in double-stops serves as a pivot to a tenderly lyrical reminiscence of the first movement.
As a 15-year-old wunderkind at the Moscow Conservatory, Rachmaninoff was singled out for greatness by no less an authority than Tchaikovsky. Shortly after graduating in 1892, he composed the Prelude in C-sharp Minor for solo piano that would become his calling card. This precocious success was followed by a period of debilitating lethargy and depression, during which Rachmaninoff found it almost impossible to compose. It wasn’t until 1900, after he consulted a physician specializing in hypnosis, that his creative juices began to flow freely again. A celebrated concert pianist, he replenished his repertoire in 1910 with the 13 preludes of his Op. 32. The two sets of Études-tableaux (Pictorial Etudes), written before and during World War I, draw on a wide range of extramusical stimuli, from the paintings of Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin to the Catholic Mass for the Dead.
Although Rachmaninoff looked to Chopin’s Op. 28 Preludes as his model, his own contributions to the genre were cut from a different cloth. The Op. 32 Preludes brought the textural richness that characterized his earlier essays to a new level of complexity. The bell-like melody of the G-Major Prelude is embedded in a dense skein of arpeggios, whose shimmering luminosity briefly dims in the minor-key midsection.
The languidly undulating triplets that open the A-Minor Étude-tableau outline the first four notes of the lugubrious “Dies irae” plainchant, one of Rachmaninoff’s signature motifs. Although he seldom disclosed the programmatic themes he wove into his music, he informed Ottorino Respighi—who orchestrated four of the Études-tableaux—that the second of the Op. 39 pieces depicted “the sea and seagulls.” In the middle of this miniature tone poem, the water’s placid surface is roiled by a passing squall.
Debussy’s impressionistic influence can be heard in this short, delicately atmospheric tonal sketch. Rachmaninoff’s tenderly swooning melodic line hovers above and below a restless ostinato accompaniment, often blurring the music’s underlying 12/8 meter. Just before the end, a shower of softly pattering 16th notes leads to a series of whole- and half-tone trills that resolve in a quiet C-major arpeggio.
Throughout his career, Shostakovich was alternately lionized and demonized by the Soviet Union’s cultural apparatchiks—it’s small wonder that his music veers wildly between mordant satire (the opera The Nose and the ballet The Golden Age), patriotic bombast (the Second Symphony and the symphonic poem October, both eulogizing the 1917 Russian Revolution), and bleak alienation (almost any of his 15 string quartets, his most deeply personal works). The first of Shostakovich’s two piano trios dates from his student days at the Leningrad Conservatory; its high-spirited lyricism is a far cry from the brooding intensity of its E-minor cousin of 1944, a work, as Shostakovich biographer Ian MacDonald observes, “begun in grief and concluded in anger.” The grief was occasioned by the death that February of the composer’s close friend Ivan Sollertinsky, an eminent music critic. The anger arose from the horrific revelations in the press a few months later of the Nazi death camps that had been liberated by Soviet troops.
The opening Andante casts a haunting spell, with the muted cello intoning a plaintive melody in ghostly, high-lying harmonics. The violin joins in, followed by the piano in hollow octaves. The pulse quickens and the piano introduces a brighter variant of the melody, set against throbbing eighth notes in the strings. Shostakovich goes on to develop this material in a brilliant and frequently sardonic manner, using changing meters and canonic imitation. The second movement starts in a light, scherzo-like vein that soon turns demonic, with angular leaps, stabbing accents, and relentlessly driving rhythms. The Largo is a dirge-like passacaglia, characterized by a harmonic pattern that repeats itself every eight bars. The finale, a grimly grotesque dance of death, follows without a break. Shostakovich would incorporate Jewish themes into many of his later works, but never to greater emotional effect than in this savage Allegretto.
In the seven years that separated his First and Second violin sonatas—written in 1879 and 1886, respectively—Brahms added a clutch of major works to his chamber music portfolio, including the Second and Third piano trios (in C major and C minor, respectively), the Cello Sonata No. 2 in F Major, and the first of his two brightly exuberant string quintets (Op. 88 in F Major). Each of these works is the product of mature and unostentatious mastery. The muscular lyricism that characterized much of Brahms’s earlier chamber music has receded into the background. In its place is a more restrained, but no less compelling, mixture of tenderness and strength.
The Op. 100 Sonata’s first movement—marked, somewhat unusually, Allegro amabile—exudes the relaxed give-and-take of a companionable dialogue. The pianist introduces a lilting four-bar melody, whereupon the violinist echoes the final phrase as if to say, encouragingly, “Yes, I’m listening. Go on.” After two or three more false starts, the violin takes up the theme and runs with it. From then on, the two players pass the ball back and forth, now lightheartedly, now in earnest, always careful to avoid upstaging each other. The amiable repartee continues in the Andante tranquillo, with slow and quick sections alternating in rounded A-B-A-B-A form. The main theme of the concluding Allegretto grazioso, like that of the first movement, surges upward in rising arcs before returning to rest at its starting point.
Dvořák was in his early 30s when he first made his mark as a composer in his native Bohemia. Until then, his reputation had hardly reached beyond the city limits of Prague, where he earned a modest living as a piano teacher and church organist. His career finally took off when the Austrian government awarded him a stipend in 1875. The prestigious prize brought him to the attention of Brahms, who recommended the young Czech composer to his own publisher in Berlin as “a very talented man.” Thereafter, Dvořák lost no time in producing a string of highly accomplished works in sundry genres that were not only technically masterful but enormously popular. By the mid-1880s, his reputation was spreading by leaps and bounds, with major publishers bidding for the privilege of advertising his newest works in their catalogs.
The A-Major Piano Quintet of 1887, by turns brilliantly exuberant and poignantly melancholy, has long been one of Dvořák’s most beloved works. In the opening Allegro, the cello spins out a languorous melody that pivots adroitly from major to minor, provoking a vivacious riposte from the other players. The second theme is introduced by the viola, Dvořák’s own instrument, and has a more restless and urgent character. The violist does the honors again in the warmly lyrical slow movement, based on a dumka, or traditional Slavic folk lament. Its measured strains give way to a fast and furious Scherzo (the subtitle “Furiant” refers to a Bohemian folk dance), whose boisterous energy is tempered by a flowing countermelody and a tranquil middle section. The Finale is built around a rollicking, high-spirited tune that gets bandied from one instrument to another.
—Harry Haskell