Shostakovich: Symphony No. 15 in A Major, Op. 141: IV. Adagio - Allegretto - Adagio - Allegretto

this last movement is my favorite. it's hard to find a recording where i can recreate how playing it last week felt, partly because we took it so slow, but it seems somehow right to me now. this is the only youtube recording i can find even remotely approaching it.

it begins with another low brass chorale, with something extra - a timpani death knell, with added interjections from a lone wood block. and then something so lovely so as to be out of place - violin melody which leads you on and on, somewhere undisclosed, so frail and without direction that breathing will break it. it goes nowhere. it's so easy to play this and phrase it according to its contour, but really it is even more haunting when it manages to stay perfectly still - singing while barely exhaling at all, as if really singing will somehow break one's voice.
this is followed by a passacaglia, and it finally builds into the a gigantic scream that is the entire symphony's second loud spot. it is beaten down by despair, with clarinet and bassoon solos that might have been plucky but are too exhausted to protest. the violins again, made even more achingly beautiful by the fact that they just aren't allowed to phrase, to speak, to say anything beyond a wordless toneless line which is supposed to somehow encompass one's whole existence.

and then the symphony simply dies, the violin's flat line on the heart monitor acknowledged by a ghost's procession of percussion and keyboard instruments that is inexorable, irrevocable, and completely unsympathetic. this last percussion section takes place over a glistening a major chord which lasts for a minute, and then evaporates. the writing for the percussion is amazing here - the steady tick tock of wood block and castanets, against the quarter, quarter, (eighth rest) eighth | quarter, quarter which gets passed through the piccolo, xylophone, and timpani. it's the grim reaper! or so my imagination likes to think. he is unpitying, and he doesn't care that you don't want it to end like this.

there is no sense of grief - nothing so gratuitous or healthy as that. there is only: the fact of life, then death; the remnants of a desire to change that fact; and the emptiness of that impossibility.
it's a symphony so personal that it feels almost insulting to clap after hearing it.

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 15 in A Major, Op. 141: III. Allegretto

there are a number of recordings out there that insist on taking the first and third movements at the speed of  traditional "fast" movements. after giving all of these a good listen i have decided there's definitely a reason shostakovich doesn't write "allegro" ever. this movement is obviously the symphony's "scherzo," but though it has a bit of that atmosphere, it shouldn't be taken too fast.

the lead-in is attacca from the previous movement, a series of ascending fifths in the bassoon that rudely interrupts the reverie that might be inspired by the final pizzicati of the second movement.

this is the only recording i can find which actually takes the speed of this movement as the title implies. i like the deliberateness of this tempo. nothing about it should be light or carefree or funny.

the theme played by the clarinet and next the violin is actually twelve tone music. one of the interesting things the conductor told us during our rehearsals was that as a soviet composer shosty was forced to speak against twelve tone music as bourgeois excessiveness. so it's quite interesting that he does his own exploration with it here. also, this is the most earwormy twelve tone music i have ever heard, and he's obviously into the idea of making music that, while still twelve-tone, is still rhythmically and even harmonically graspable.

the second theme is a sidling, ingratiating little slip of a tune played by the solo violin and then the clarinetist. it is followed by a development of sorts, which is very short - a theme by the cello section, which gets repeated by the wind section, both with amazingly orchestrated rhythm sections in the background. this is rounded off with a declarative bassoon solo, leading back into the ascending fifths that start the movement. 

the last thing worth noting about this movement is the use of the percussion ticking off to the close. this is remarkable writing and really foreshadows the end of the symphony.

the end of the movement might be considered "cute" in a way, but i would smack anyone who felt like giggling after the end as sometimes happens with cutesy movements in symphonic concerts. this movement is not about being cute or light. one of the other interesting anecdotes the conductor told us last week was how he met shostakovich in old age, when he was a boy. he was in so many respects a broken man, shaking with parkinson's, sickly and strange. in this movement one gets a sense of wrongness, a twisted discomfort of melodies that wiggle around and can't ever seem to find anything comfortable. everything is wrong, the bedsheets are itchy and visions are dancing at the corners of the eyes, the voice won't work correctly and the eyes are too dry to cry. he is about to die in this symphony, and this movement is shaking, hallucinating maybe, the skeletal remains of a harrowed life.

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 15 in A Major, Op. 141: II. Adagio - Largo - Adagio - Allegretto

The second movement begins with a chorale by the brass in F minor, but it is the least comforting chorale one can ever imagine. it is comprised of moving chromatic thirds, with a horn pedal on a clashing C. it rises and falls in dynamic, cadencing in various wrong keys.

this is followed by a mournful, songful extended cello solo, with muted affirmations in the strings. 

the chorale comes back, with a slight half-step of different material, cadencing (weirdly) in e major. the cello comes back, also a half step off. shostakovich has a strange gift for making material seem the same but different.

after a short violin solo, two eerie chords at about 5:30 will get repeated at various junctures throughout the movement. the cello ends on a trill, and the the flutes come in with sixths, a relatively simple motif. the second time this comes around, it's the violas with the trill and a trombone giving a long soliloquy. this is a fantastic solo.

the flutes come back to cadence their melody from before in C major, with ominous pipings from a distant trumpet. the trombone comes back with its solo, but it is weirdly different in a way that is hard to pin; it sounds a bit brighter, perhaps.

the second time the violin plays the same solo, it leads to a crashing, almost grandiose climax. this is the second loud part of the symphony, and it is a big fanfare for the brass against descending chromatic lines in the strings, which almost immediately turn it from something that sounds grand and affirmative into something screeching and despairing. the fanfare has no choice but to succumb, and the brass join the strings in the chromatic meandering, eventually descending back into the quiet sixth motif, this time given by muted trumpets.
note the woodblock. this rhythm - quarter, dotted eighth, sixteenth, quarter, quarter - is so ominous, so inevitable, and it foreshadows the percussion's presence which seems so deathly in the later movements.
the strings echo the opening brass chorale at 2:48. celeste solo right afterwards, lone drops in a well of silence.
grey pizzicati end the movement, like small thumps.

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 15 in A Major, Op. 141: I. Allegretto

ok here we go. i am 21 posts behind, complete fail. i'm also sick, which is why i've put off making posts even though my audition was on monday and got home on tuesday. i've also started working here, so that is enough disincentive for me to be productive when i get home that i pretty much haven't done anything except sleep.
but here we go!
one change i am going to make (at least to try) is to make sets of posts. this relieves some of the difficulty of choosing a whole new work every day and allows me to cover complete works instead of just partial, because a "set" of posts will be comprised of the several movements of a given work.


we'll start with the symphony that played as part of the orchestra this week, shosty 15. this is actually a fantastic symphony and i like it way more than i thought i would. it's dark, personal, and very quiet. it's also very sad. if you give this a listen, do it alone, in a quiet room, with the earphones on and the hand our mouse on the volume control, because chances are the quiet parts will be too quiet for you to hear and the loud parts (there are only three in the whole symphony, all fairly brief) will be too loud for you to want your volume up.


shostakovich's 15th symphony was his last, and once you know this fact you can't help but listen to it with an ear towards death, in a way that i haven't found present with very many pieces (even the ones that have death in them). it is so quiet and so bitter. he was four years from his death (1975, written in 1971) when he wrote it. though that's quite a while, the fact that this was his last symphony is forever going to mean it's the one that faces "the end." amazingly enough this is a view which enriches it so much as to be almost astonishing (and we know a lot of other things about his condition when writing it that make this view make sense anyway). so though in general the music sounds like a lot of other shostakovich music - dry, sardonic, even witty - by the latter movements it just sounds like muted despair, or even resignation. that is, if the tempi are correct - it seems easy to miss this, in favor of something faster and pluckier. this works OK for the first movement, but it's worth having an ear towards how wooden some of this can sound. one of the things that came up during rehearsal for this piece was that many things could - and maybe should - sound so locked in that they were unmusical - and that has a striking sound that can be used to huge effect in this symphony.

he starts off by writing a bent and broken little tune which somehow manages to incorporate rigidified, dry snatches of rossini's william tell overture, as if these cheerful things have become brittle and stale. when prodded by authorities, he originally described it as a toy store, full of grotesque curiosities, but the only true part of this description (which was more a veneer for the sake of political correctness) was the grotesque part. by the time we get to the creepy little mishmash of cross rhythms and vaguely twelve-tone music at 4:23 which soon crescendoes into a sort of crippled climax, we know that there's not really any sense of the innocence or naivete that might be implied by the toy store description. we have to be kept on our toes by the rhythm and meter changes as well, which are not really grating but are unpredictable. 


notice the use of percussion - celeste with the two introductory notes, and lots of xylophone solos. shostakovich does some fantastic writing for the percussion section during this symphony - wood block and castanets among the required instruments.


the returning motif of Eb-Ab-C-B-A is said to represent the name of his grandson, sascha. we all know of shosty's penchant for spelling out things in his music, usually his own name (and elmira, in symphony 10), so this is pretty likely.