In Steppe and Out
,1 I ("SIC SHOSTAKOVITCH was sixty last Sunday, as good an age for a problem child as any. On the night before the birthday, his String Quartet No. 7 (1960) and slenderer pieces of much earlier date were done at a Macnaghten Concert by the Parrenin consort, Margaret Price (soprano), Yfrah Neaman (violin) and others. On the night itself, Ida Haendel, with Constantin Silvestri and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, did the Violin Concerto (1955) at the Royal Festival Hall.
The concerto was preceded by an Elgar rarity, the overture (so-called) In the South, which may be in for a comeback and certainly merits one. This was deft programme-planning from more than one point of view. To some ears Shosta- kovitch benefited by the juxtaposition; to others (mine included) the bonus went to Elgar. After the tumultuous, tune-packed warmth and generous mood-span of In the South, the con- certo's first movement (Nocturne) opened up like a wet, woeful steppe. David Oistrakh, to whom the concerto is dedicated. would have us believe that this Nocturne is a 'meditation on life and the fate of Man.' But music is inside life, just a part of it—and not, I would say, a part which, of its nature, can usefully meditate on the whole. Music as a branch of philosophy never sold a stall, still less a seven-and-sixpenny.
Fate, of course, is a different matter. Fate brings us nice and nasty thing, joys of sound as well as symphonic frustration. If I find the Nocturne of the Violin Concerto frustrating, that is because Shostakovitch here uses his superb polyphonies and other master-builder techniques to create and rub in a conventional mood rather than capture us basically by purely musical devisings and magics. The wet woeful steppe conjured up by his drab harmonies and overcast scoring has long been one of the stan- dard Russian images. The same goes for the rumbustious, pop-fest finale (Burlesque). The vision here is of peasant skirts and peasant high- boots twirling and gopaking away like anything.
It is not to be denied that Shostakovitch re- states standard images with a prickle, tartness, hell-for-leather impetus and other qualities which are all his own. There's never a breath of cliche. At the same time I get the impression of con- formity, even of fetters. To what extent is his musical 'ideology' innate? To what extent, on the other nand. has it been steered and trimmed by Kremlin bugle calls of long ago and not so long ago against formalistic perversions. de- graded bourgeois culture and anti-popular tendencies? The Soviet composer's duty was not to the high priests of Western cacophany, but to the Soviet people: he must consider the people's taste; he must compose the sort of music the people wanted. Or, at any rate, the sort of music the Central Committee of the Communist party thought the people wanted.
At the height of `Zhdanovism,' Shostakovitch was pressured into public breast-beating. The Party, speaking for the People, had decreed him in error; and Party and People, he confessed, were always right. That the man who had in him the Violin Concerto's noble third movement (Passacaglia) should have recanted thus, attribut- ing aesthetic infallibility to a political caucus which itself changed tack ten years later, is among the more bizarre and sorry happenings of musical history.
The important thing is, however, that although the ideological clouds had not lifted, the Passacaglia got through. Not, I imagine, that anybody started whistling it in the Kremlin. Again on Sunday night, as at any valid per- formance, the Passacaglia offered precisely those musical devisings and magics that I miss in the Nocturne. Miss Haendel drew a strikingly pure and warmly shaped solo line above or through grave intervolutions of ground-bass, chorale harmonies and finely-muscled counterpoint. As usual, I though of J. S. Bach. But no. None save Shostakovitch could have conceived this tonal complex and the mood it breeds. The Bachian affinities are obvious. But they do not dominate. They don't (and here's a vital thing) make Shostakovitch look puny or epigone. Third movement out of four, the Passacaglia is the concerto's peak, centre of gravity and reason-of- being. To my mind the biting, brilliant Scherzo is the only other movement that matches and complements it in force of musical thinking.
The Macnaghten concert was to mark Roberto Gerhard's seventieth birthday as well as Shosta- kovitch's sixtieth. The programme included a neat and pretty confrontation. Miss Price, accompanied by James Lockhart, sang four Pushkin settings by Shostakovitch dating from 1936. All were traditional in cut : plenteous curve in the vocal line, fluent part writing for the piano and incidental touches of 'drama' which sometimes came off and sometimes didn't. Turning from Russian to Catalan, Miss Price, a clever as well as melodious girl, gave seven out of a dozen songs (l'Infantamente de Shahara- zada: text by LOpez-Picei) which Mr Gerhard composed fifty years ago. The young man's models seem to have been R. Strauss, Brahms and Granados, with a dip here and there into white-gloves-and-palm-court balladry.
Of Mr Gerhard's String Quartet No. 2 (1962) and his new Duo Concertante, I have to report that, like his Concerto for Orchestra, each is a string of marvellously imagined Effects without a Cause. They made Shostakovitch sound re- assuringly behind the times.
CHARLES REID
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