Dmitri Shostakovich.

Dmitri Shostakovich 

Piano Trio no. 1 op. 8, Piano Trio no. 2 in E minor op. 67, Seven Songs (Alexander Blok) op. 127

ArteMiss Trio: Adela Stajnochrova--violin, Alzbeta Vlckova--cello, Jana Holmanova--piano, Alzbeta Polackova--soprano. Production: Jiri Stilec. Text Eng. Ger., Czech. Recorded: 10, 11/2004, Lichtenstejn Palace, Martinu Hall, Prague. Published: 2005. TT: 63:17. 1 CD Arco Diva UP 0069-2 131 (distribution Classic).

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975) is one of the composers who determined the course taken by music in the 20th century. He started very early, writing his 1st Piano Trio at the age of 17. His lifelong output covered a huge range of genres of classical music including film music but from that early beginning he showed great individuality with strong distinctive features, unusual technical maturity (he was himself an outstanding pianist) and enormous powers of musical expression. Naturally his 1st Piano Trio of 1923 still bears the traces of the predecessors and teacher admired by the young composer. Here we find the influences of Tchaikovsky, but also of Skriabin and Glazunov. The romantic twelve-minute piece is sentimental, but also merry and in places appropriately urgent. The performers have understood everything down to the smallest detail and we can perhaps say that they felt an affinity with the young composer's mind. Shostakovich was later to develop and deepen everything to be found in the 1st Piano Trio in masterly fashion (This was a piece actually completed by the composer's pupil Boris Tishchenko, but the fact makes no difference to the contention). Shostakovich's graduation piece at Petrograd Conservatory--his 1st Symphony aroused such interest and admiration at its premiere in 1926 that it literally opened the doors of the world to the composer. He was then to react quite clearly in his work to his period of successes and frustrations under the oppressive Stalin regime. Naturally he invested his deepest reflections in his wartime works, of which the most famous is the 7th Leningrad Symphony. His Second Piano Trio written in 1944 falls into this cruel period, although by this time Shostakovich together with other artists had been moved to the wartime rear. In this "great" trio, the ArteMiss Trio is so expressively concentrated that in places the interpretation sounds raw and rough, but this was just the way that the composer conceived the piece, for the Nazi frenzy seemed to be endless. The piece is rightly considered one of his masterpieces. At its Prague premiere in the second year of the Prague Spring Festival in 1947 Shostakovich played himself with D. Oistrakh and M. Sadlo. It should be said that the young members of the ArteMiss Trio have definitely not been cowed by this brilliant precedent, but have seen it more as a challenge for their own conception of how the work should be performed.

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Shostakovich dedicated the vocal-instrumental suite Seven Songs on the Poetry of A. Blok to Galina Vishnyevska, the wife of Mstislav Rostropovich. At the premiere in 1967 they performed it with I. Oistrakh and M. Vainberg. Shostakovich's lyrical forcefulness and economical rhythmic and melodic element give peculiar power to verses full of symbolism and tragedy. All four instruments--human voice, cello, violin and piano--grow out of single stem and especially in the piano part reach out into the darkest sides of human life. The influence of Mahler is detectable here, but it is Shostakovich's Mahler or, if you like, Mahler after more than fifty years.

Shostakovich was and remains a great composer with a huge impact on the development of modern music. The unique essence of his musical vocabulary and style is present in all his pieces, but as is logical they appear to us in most concentrated form, emphasised by simplification in his chamber music. The rather unusual choice of pieces for the CD, each written in a different major phase of the composer's career, brings out this element to the full. The ArteMiss Trio is young and talented, as we know already from preceding recordings and many concerts and competitions, Shostakovich evidently "suits" the ensemble, even if at times the expressiveness is almost over the top (for example in the end of the 2nd Trio or in the song The Storm), but that was just how Shostakovich was: his life was so full of struggle and emotion. I would offer a mild criticism only in relation to what are somewhat insufficiently nuanced dynamics, although on the other hand, there are some internally fully sung passages. In terms of technique and above all interpretation the members of the ensemble have given their all to the pieces. This is equally true of the soprano Alzbeta Polackova, who performed difficult songs that make extreme demands in range and expression with honour.