Scottish Ensemble: Shostakovich Chamber Symphony in C minor, Op. 110a (excerpt, online release)

Released online - 08/02/24

Scottish Ensemble | Oscar Sansom, director

Chamber string group Scottish Ensemble released the second of two specially commissioned films, produced with Glasgow production company Forest of Black and directed by Oscar Sansom, on their YouTube channel on 8th February at 11 am, consisting of a specially lit and staged performance of an excerpt from Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony.  Advance publicity promised:

“The urgent and powerful Chamber Symphony is brought to life in this gripping film, as Scottish Ensemble’s musicians perform with intense concentration in fiendish solos, impassioned dialogues and thrilling ensemble playing.”

“… atmospheric shafts of light creep into frame illuminating, in stunning detail, the fervent physicality of the musicians as they present this demonic dance of death.”

Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony Op.110a is in fact a transcription for string orchestra, by the violist, conductor and arranger Rudolf Barshai, of the 1960 String Quartet No.8 in C minor Op.110.  I got to know the original piece round about the age of 10 from the famous 1962 LP by the Borodin Quartet, as the B-side to the ultra-romantic Borodin String Quartet No.2.  My father, a fine amateur violinist who played quartets with his friends, had a set of parts, and I heard him practising the fiendishly difficult first violin part a couple of years later. It is an emotionally intense, melancholic and introspective work, full of quotations from his other music and an obsessive recurrence of his four-note DSCH musical monogram. It was written in three days (12th – 14th July) in Dresden, where he was to write the music for a film about the bombing of that city towards the end of the Second World War. I was born 3 days later, so the piece has always held an additional fascination for me.  At this time, Shostakovich was at a low ebb, having just been forced to join the Communist Party after four decades of giving it the swerve, including the entire Stalin era. There were still areas of devastation in Dresden, which made a deep impression on him. The dedication to “the victims of fascism and the war” seems genuine enough, but many speculate that he also meant the victims of all totalitarian regimes (many of Shostakovich’s friends had perished in Stalin’s purges) and indeed, as he was deeply depressed with self-loathing and contemplating suicide, probably also himself. Composing this quartet must have been a great release and a thankfully effective act of self-care: he went on to write another 7 quartets, the last 4 symphonies and ‘Katerina Ismailova’, a revision of his greatest opera, ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’, as well as numerous other pieces. The sleeve notes by Erik Smith of the 1962 recording contain the following: “The Borodin Quartet played this work to the composer at his Moscow home, hoping for his criticisms. But Shostakovich, overwhelmed by this beautiful realisation of his most personal feelings, buried his head in his hands and wept. When they had finished playing, the four musicians quietly packed up their instruments and stole out of the room.”

The ’dance of death’ excerpt referred to is the Allegro molto, the second of the five movements, written to be played without a break. Therein lies the first artistic issue I would have with the short 3-minute film – this music was never meant to be stripped of its musical context. The second movement erupts violently after a ruefully introspective and disconsolate Largo fugue on the DSCH motif, framing a solo recitative and a solo aria-like episode.  A crescendo at the end of the first movement launches the violence of the second, with spirit-shocking dramatic contrast, of which excerpting robs the music. The second movement is shot through with trauma, panic and terror, in a more internalised expression than the Scherzo of the 10th Symphony and the ‘massacre’ scene at the end of the second movement of the 11th.  The middle of the movement quotes from the Jewish klezmer dance in the finale of the Second Piano Trio, speeded up to a frenetic tempo and mingled with the DSCH motif, reminding us of the composer’s steadfast opposition to anti-Semitism. This quote is reprised at the end of the movement when the music stops suddenly. The third movement, a grotesque, macabre waltz fashioned around the motif and other quotations, then continues the nightmare into a surreal ghoulish dimension, to my mind a better candidate for the name ‘dance of death’ and a crucial context again lost through excerpting.

As a piece of chiaroscuro cinematography, on the other hand, the short film is pretty phenomenal.  The ingenious lighting effects emphasise the concentration and focus on the faces of the musicians and a sense of gritty physicality of the relationship between player and instrument, as well as the illusion of the drive of an almost demonic possession as their individualities are subsumed into the music.  One crucial relationship, however, and this would be my second and final artistic issue with the film, is absent: the relationship between the players themselves that is the crucial element of chamber music live performance.

And the playing? Absolutely superb. I’ve been to many live performances of the Eighth Quartet over the years, including ones by the Allegri, Fitzwilliam, RTE Academica, Smetana, Borodin and Beethoven quartets, and many others; not so many, it is true, of the Barshai arrangement. But I’ve not heard better than this taut and gritty reading of the first of the two scherzi.  It only makes me want to hear the Scottish Ensemble play the whole piece.