Mannes Chamber Music: Shostakovich, Haydn, Barber and Debussy

Yesterday evening, the student recital at Goldmark Hall included two string quartets, one by Joseph Haydn and the other by Claude Debussy, as well as chamber pieces by Dmitri Shostakovich and Samuel Barber that featured a lighter style of music than is usually associated with either of these two composers.

The program opened with Shostakovich's Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano.  The five movements - Prelude, Gavotte, Elegy, Waltz and Polka - are taken from film scores, ballets and even a cartoon (The Tale of the Priest and His Servant Balda) that Shostakovich composed over a twenty year period from 1935 to 1955.  The Gavotte and the Elegy, for example, are both taken from the Third Ballet Suite (1952).  It should be noted that the arrangement of these selections was not completed by Shostakovich himself but more likely by his associate Lev Atovmian.

The other piece of "light" music on the program was Barber's Souvenirs, Op. 28 (1951).  The work exists in several arrangements.  That performed yesterday evening was the version for four hands, but here played instead on two pianos.  As the titles of the six movements - Waltz, Schottische, Pas de deux, Two-Step, Hesitation-Tango and Galop - would suggest, the work is intended as a fond remembrance.  Barber himself wrote:

"Imagine a divertissement in a setting of the Palm Court of the Hotel Plaza in New York, the year about 1914, epoch of the first tangos; 'Souvenirs' —remembered with affection, not in irony or with tongue in cheek, but in amused tenderness."

The first of the quartets to be played was Haydn's String Quartet in D, Op. 64, No. 5 (1790), nicknamed The Lark after the soaring melody played by the first violin in the opening movement.  Haydn is known as the "Father of the String Quartet" and no piece demonstrates as well as this how fully deserving he was of the title.  This work is probably his most popular in the genre and the first movement the most exhilarating he wrote for any quartet.

The second quartet, and the final piece on the program, was Debussy's String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10 (1893).  Debussy himself intensely disliked having the term "impressionism" applied to his music, and yet there are few other phrases that so aptly describe the shimmering quality of this work.  Debussy here adapted the cyclic structure devised by César Franck to the extent that he had the opening theme reappear in each movement.  But rather than content himself with repeating the theme unchanged, the composer instead subtly transformed it at each appearance so that the sensations evoked through its reiteration constantly evolved throughout the length of the quartet.