![]() ![]() No one will put his hand round my waist, no one will press his lips to mine, The wind caresses the birch tree, the sun warms it with his heat,įor everyone there’s a smile, but no one comes to me, The dove hastens to his mate, but no one hurries to me. The foal runs after the filly, the tom-cat seeks the queen, The present Elegy transcribes her aria just prior to Sergei’s seduction: Shostakovich is kinder to Katerina Ismailova than was Leskov, attributing the murders more to Sergei than to her, and describing his opera as the “tragic portrayal of the destiny of a talented, smart and outstanding woman, dying in the nightmarish atmosphere of pre-Revolutionary Russia.” Above all, he makes her sympathetic by giving her extraordinarily moving music to sing. While the prisoners are being ferried across a river, Katerina drags her rival into the water, and both women drown. Eventually the law catches up with them, and as they are transported to Siberia, Sergei leaves Katerina for another woman. The two lovers go on a murder spree, killing, in short order, the suspicious Boris, then Zinovy, and then a relative who arrives to claim the estate. When a womanizing farmhand, Sergei, arrives at the estate, he wastes no time in seducing the unhappy woman, who quickly falls in love with him. The “heroine,” Katerina Ismailova, is deeply unhappy in her marriage to Zinovy, bored, and browbeaten by her father-in-law Boris. ![]() (Later, the composer would quote another aria from the same opera in his String Quartet No.8.) The opera, based on an 1865 novel by Nikolai Leskov, tells a grisly tale. The almost impossibly beautiful Elegy comes from Shostakovich’s then-not-yet-completed opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Perhaps not surprisingly, Two Pieces - his first foray into quartet writing, composed in 1931– consisted of transcriptions from two of these theatrical works. He wrote his first four-movement quartet in 1938, at the age of thirty-two, by which time he had already composed, in addition to five symphonies, a staggering number of theatrical works, including ten film scores, incidental music for eight plays, two operas, and three ballets. NOTES Shostakovich, Two Pieces for String Quartet: Elegy and Polkaĭmitri Shostakovich, celebrated in the chamber music world for his fifteen magnificent string quartets, came to the form relatively late. Tickets are now on sale at the Honolulu Museum of Art front desk, and online at 56, “Voces Intimae” (“Intimate Voices”)ĭMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Two Pieces for String Quartet Album reviewLUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN String Quartet No.16, op. See More Your browser does not support the audio element. This is an exceptional recording of chamber music. ![]() Finally, Onyx's engineering work in England's Potton Hall, Suffolk, is vivid and sharp. For the Ehnes Quartet, the quartet is something like a Scandinavian expressionist drama, with a flow of darkly submerged inner emotions. 63, even though it clearly shares that work's creative genesis. Then there is the five-movement Sibelius quartet, his only work in the form and a difficult piece to come to terms with: it does not fit into the epic vision of the composer's symphonies, nor into the transparent language of his theater music, nor even into the gloom of the contemporaneous Symphony No. Sample the first movement for a taste the four movements are all well thought out. Second is the extremely sharp recording of the much-recorded Schubert, which tends toward the hyper-emotional end of the spectrum but cages the emotions into hard-edged, slashing counterpoint. 56 ("Voces Intimae"), which have rarely if ever been put together but have everything to do with each other, beginning with the threat of death faced by each composer at the time. 810 ("Death and the Maiden") and Sibelius' String Quartet, Op. First there is the unusual pairing of the two D minor quartets, Schubert's String Quartet No. The strengths of this recording by the Ehnes Quartet, led by the remarkable Canadian violinist James Ehnes, are manifold. Purchase and download this album in a wide variety of formats depending on your needs.
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