Mannes Chamber Music: Mozart, Shostakovich and Schubert

There were no programs available at yesterday evening's recital at Mannes.  Instead the assistant director came to the front of the room and announced each work, listed its movements and named the students performing it before the piece was played.  This, however, was only a slight inconvenience.  More important to the audience was that the recital featured major works by Mozart, Shostakovich and Schubert that are standards of the chamber music repertoire.

The first piece was Mozart's Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, K. 478 (1785).  The passage of time has given the work a familiarity that masks how revolutionary and difficult it must have sounded to audiences when first performed.  It was the first of three (or six) quartets originally commissioned by Franz Anton Hoffmeister.  The publisher, however, was deeply unhappy with the complexity of the music and wrote to Mozart: "Write more popularly, or else I can neither print nor pay for anything of yours!"  The contract between them was eventually canceled over this issue.

There followed Shostakovich's String Quartet in C minor, No. 8, Op. 110 (1960).  Written in East Germany while Shostakovich was composing the score for a Soviet film memorializing the horrific destruction of Dresden by the Allies in 1945, this is an extremely dark work that has become the most popular and frequently performed of all the composer's quartets.  It was not the the gloomy reminiscence of World War II alone, though, that gave this work its black texture.  Shostakovich was at the time undergoing serious personal problems that led him so far as to consider suicide.  The causes of his depression were multiple.  For one thing, he felt he had betrayed his principles by bowing to pressure from Khrushchev to join the Communist party.  For another, the muscular disorder (poliomyelitis) from which he long suffered was progressing to the extent that he found it difficult to continue playing the piano. These afflictions prompted Shostakovich to regard the quartet as his valediction and even epitaph.  As he wrote to his friend Isaak Davidovich Glikman regarding the piece:

I reflected that if I die someday then it's hardly likely anyone will write a work dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write one myself. You could even write on the cover: 'Dedicated to the memory of the composer of this quartet'.

Closing the program was Schubert's Piano Trio No. 1 in B flat, D. 898 (1827).  Although written close to the end of the composer's life, there is little in it to suggest the melancholy that pervades many of his other works from this period.  Though a comparatively long piece, the music flows smoothly from beginning to end in a beguiling stream.  Even the andante, however subdued, has an air about it of calm acceptance.  In all, the trio has an uplifting quality to it that here provided an appropriate end to the evening.