December 18, 2015

  • Sonnet Settings by Shostakovich and Liszt

     

    Shostakovich & Liszt Sonnets
    Dmitri Hvorostokovsky, baritone. Ivari Ilja, piano.
    Ondine 1277
    Total Time:  58:53
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    Coming at the end of the composer’s life, Shostakovich’s settings of poetry by Michelangelo Buonarroti is a work of often dark and despairing economical writing.  The 1974 Suite on Poems by Michelangelo Buonarrotti is the featured work on this new Ondine release featuring noted baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky.  Created to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the artist’s birth, the suite consists of eight sonnets and three poems translated in Russian by Abram Efros and are the texts for these eleven songs. The music here is often rather stark, often angular, more atonal at times, and brooding.  The piano almost provides single-lined commentary with bare harmonic support for the declamatory vocal lines.  Some feel this is partly Shostakovich taking a look back at the text-setting of Mussorgsky and some of the expressive writing surely connects to that great 19th-Century composer.  While we might also brood deeply about the texts used here, we can also think of this as a composer expressing his own final thoughts on the legacy of another artist, perhaps reflecting on his own in what must surely have been felt at his own last days.  In “Dante”, a four-note motif is perhaps a not so subtle Beethoven reference connected to this great literary giant as well.  One does get the sense that Shostakovich felt his own artistic contribution would far outlive him and he was of course more than correct!  The suite tends to appear in its orchestrated version, but this rather severe music seems to carry a more intriguing austerity in its chamber setting here.  The final movement has an almost magical quality to it with touches of earlier Shostakovich in the piano line which becomes quite animated and asserts more harmonic anchors with an almost folk-like sensibility.

    Franz Liszt is mostly remembered for his brilliant piano music so the inclusion of these Petrarch Sonnets is a rather nice complement.  As one would expect, the piano part plays an integral role in establishing mood and imagery against the vocal line.  These songs of love feature a great deal of imagery which Liszt matches equally with compositional leeway for repeated words and emphasis that is created by placing key texts at the top of a line.  Liszt worked on these pieces between 1843-1846 creating four different settings, the first for tenor and piano, a set for just piano (the more familiar perhaps in a third revision that ended up in the Annees de pelerinage II), and one for low voice and piano published in 1883.  These pieces of course fit more into the grand romantic style of the period with perhaps a touch of the operatic at times.

    Though some may prefer a darker bass sound in these pieces, Hvorostovsky’s voice somehow manages just the right balance of anguish and deeper feeling allowing accompanist Ivari Ilja to add the proper emotional counterpoint in the Shostakovich.  In the Liszt, it is easier perhaps for Hvorostovsky to open up a bit and create a bit more lyrical nuance.  The interpretation thus balances well between these two large cycles making for a rather engrossing hour of music.  The performances were recorded in 2012 and 2014 when the baritone was performing them in recitals.  The recording itself has good presence and just the right amount of ambience to help provide some depth to the otherwise starker Shostakovich.