Dinner with Dimitri
It’s been a while since I listened to Op 110. It was the third Shostakovich piece I ever heard, and the first live: a friend of mine was performing 110a, the chamber orchestra arrangement, and I went to see her play in April 2005. According to my Amazon orders I had already bought the Cello concertos a week priorly (no way! that’s actually a word!) There is a definite old nutmeg of a memory: buying those after catching just the tail end on NPR, the final whisperings and mysterious clankings at the end of the second concerto. I remember sitting listening to 110a and hearing the quotes from both cello concertos in the third movement, the allegretto.
However, the program that they had produced didn’t mention the quote from the second concerto, just the one from the beginning of the more famous first. Op. 126, the second, doesn’t get nearly enough of the attention it deserves, but that’s a topic for another day. What’s sort of odd about this particular quote, is that (as you might have noticed from the opus numbers) the “quote” in the string quartet comes from six years before the actual concerto. Hmm.
My sources (which are the internet and liner notes, rather than a mysterious ring of spies, each sneakier than the last. I haven’t worked that out yet.) tell me that that particular melody was the song the pretzel sellers sung on the streets of some Russian city somewhere. According to Dimitri it popped into his head when playing musical charades around the turn of the new year, which is a mental picture I can’t quite develop. Clearly it’s not quite that simple. He had already thought of that quote ages before he wrote the concerto. What was that sneaky Dimitri getting at… if only I could ask him…
It’s like those questions in snobby magazine interviews where they ask a celebrity which historical figures they would most like to have lunch with or bake a pie with, or whatever. I never particularly understood why people cared so much. I thought that probably if I dined with some historical figure I respect - Newton, Shakespeare, whomever - the conversation would be crap. It would be just be really awkward, like a blind date where you end up not being very interested in your partner. I’d vaguely mumble something about forces and Newton would absently feed me back some empty sentence and then we’d both awkwardly concentrate on stirring sugar into our coffees.
Well, dammit. I’d give up a hell of lot to be able to sit down with Shostakovich and talk about why he did this and that with his compositions. I finally understand the appeal of lunch with your historical hero. Thanks Dimitri, I’m truly sorry we can’t do lunch.
pretty much any of the other, later, composers. It’s generally harder for me to appreciate the stuff before 1800. The music seems less surprising to me, perhaps because I have been so exposed to that music in my life. Or, perhaps it is because the focus in that era was (as I have heard people claim) the perfection of a particular style, to write the one perfect concerto or sonata. This stands in contrast to the later goals of fully exploring the range of human emotion, or the capabilities of the orchestra, or the limits of tonality. These aims excite myself more than the clockwork perfection of Bach’s music does.
Since it was so cold and shivery, and I hadn’t listened to it in a while, I put Shostakovich 11 (op 103) while walking in. We saw it performed in Toronto around this time last year, along with my beloved 2nd Cello Concerto. (op 126). I think the symphony is underrated. Everyone seems to whine on about it being glorified film music, which I suppose is reasonably justified. The first movement does wind on and on and seems more like an introduction to the second movement than a standalone segment. It also doesn’t seem particularly complex. I suppose that the intention was to make a popular piece to commemorate 1905 (and rebellions in general, particularly the Hungarian uprising which took place just before the symphony) but it’s excellent popular music.