May 16, 2018

  • Belcea Explores Shostakovich

     

    Shostakovich: Piano Quintet; String Quartet No. 3
    Belcea String Quartet
    Piotr Anderszewski, piano
    Alpha Classics Music Alpha 360
    Total Time: 67:47
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

     

    The Belcea Quartet embarked on a concert cycle of the Beethoven quartets which they subsequently recorded with Alpha.  Other recent Alpha releases have focused on Brahms, and the serialist trio of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern.  The group has been performing the two works on this album as part of the concert repertoire for some time making both obvious choices for their first Shostakovich album.  It is also a rather unique pairing of two of the composer’s 1940s chamber works.  Shostakovich’s string quartets are rather fascinating works that tend to be overshadowed by his larger-scale symphonic pieces, but they are among some of the composer’s finest work often revealing his own intimate struggles with the ever-changing Soviet regime’s approach to his music.  At present, the Belcea Quartet enters a fairly-crowded field of recordings of these two pieces featured in about three dozen recordings.  The 1940 piano quintet is among the composer’s more popular chamber pieces with his own recording with the Beethoven String Quartet, which commissioned the work, among one of the classic recordings in the catalog.  In the quintet they are joined by pianist Piotr Anderszewski.

    The quintet takes a more unique structural approach from the onset with its more unusual five -movements, rather than four.  Each is also more accessible with identifiable and telling melodic ideas.  The second movement introduces a fugue and there is a dense little scherzo and slow-movement intermezzo before we head into the brilliant finale.  The piece is filled with opportunities for virtuosic playing, especially for the more soloistic piano line.  For these and other reasons, the work’s more populist approach garnered the first Stalin Prize in 1941.  Still, there is something strikingly symphonic when the work is fully scored.  This sits alongside the Neo-Baroque implications of a prelude and fugue of the opening two movements.  This is a full-bodied performance as well with rich tone and dramatic interpretation among the highlights here.  The great lower end of the piano line in the fugue is just miraculous in the most intimate of final few minutes.  Here is some of the quintets most darkly gorgeous music and Belcea manages to meet this gradual disintegration of sound in the work before the warm line returns in all its restrained, intimate glory.  It is a breathtaking moment of beauty in this performance.  After this rather wrenching opening, the piece shifts to an almost celebratory scherzo with great wit.  It is as if we have moved from awe to joyous wonder.  The Belcea players have great articulation here that cuts well in the texture as the piece moves along with an excellent, bright piano line in the opening segments.  The central solo violin solo moves us into the almost folk-like melodic ideas and a very familiar mid-century style.  The plaintive, singing melody of the fourth movement returns us to that melancholy beauty of the composer’s slow movements.  Excellent phrasing and matched tone and articulation here in the violins is really stunning.  What has also struck this listener about the quintet is the way we move from this fuller sound to a gradually thinner one so that by the time we arrive in the final movement we are back in light salon territory.

    Continuing in this unique 5-movement form is Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 3 in F, Op. 73 (1946).  The composer has Beethoven in the back of his mind here with an exploration of more interconnected movements that flow from one to the next.  The opening light sonata-allegro first movement features a repeat with an almost devastating double fugue in its development that winds through a variety of harmonic areas.  The second movement brings to the more acerbic style of the fifth symphony shifting to the parallel minor, but this is even more pronounced in the central movement and its violent shifts between a wild waltz meter and a march in quick alternation.  From this, we turn to a slow passacaglia among some of the composers equally more devastating and emotionally wrenching music that starts strong but slowly has its life dynamically drained away.  The final movement seems to ask the listener to consider what they have experience here with its sense of calm, turmoil, and devastation that begs to be justified in the end.  The ideas here are clearly delineated and move us through the Neo-Classical style with his formal flirtations with Baroque forms.  The piece always has this sense that we open in the modern world and end up trying to figure out what might happen next.  This is what provides a rather intriguing undercurrent to the work which is pointedly brought out in Belcea’s performance.

    These are certainly fine performances that pull the album up to the top of the heap.  The sound is crystal clear and really opens up the extreme lower ends of the music here further enhancing the piano’s lower register.  The Belcea group does an amazing job of overall balance here that pulls you into the dramatic unfolding of Shostakovich’s music and helps delineate the structures of these movements so well.  It is obviously a well-thought through performance that manages to find interest and emotional connections still well into their familiarity.  This is especially true when the music needs just a little extra rubato, or biting wit, to occasionally wink at the listener (this is especially true of their performance of the third quartet).  One of the quartet recordings of the year to track down and treasure.