11th Quartet - UK Première - 27 April 1967,
Bromsgrove Festival; London SQ.
(Carl Pini, John Tunnell, Keith Cummings, Douglas Cameron)

This new entry in the coming third edition of the Shostakovich catalogue edited by Derek Hulme will pass unremarked by most international readers but many in UK will raise at least one eyebrow. The tale is worth telling on several counts. The musical politics in USSR in 1966-7 will be remembered as far less easy to penetrate than now, even though Yuri Gagarin had sung Shostakovich to the world from space in 1961. So how did little Bromsgrove (where?) come to feature in a major first performance? Why have we never heard of the London String Quartet in any other context? The story came to light late in 1998 when I was preparing the programme booklet for the second half of the season of Bromsgrove Concerts. In a concert on 29 January 1999 the Borodin Quartet included the Eleventh and Twelfth Quartets of Shostakovich and the First Quartet of Tchaikovsky. A letter from Harold Taylor pointed out that the performance of the Eleventh would be its third in Bromsgrove. We all remembered that Bromsgrove Concerts had promoted a cycle of the quartets in October 1992, when the Brodsky Quartet played them during a weekend, but the first performance was news to most current members.

First performances have to be somewhere and although Bromsgrove would be a surprise to many in UK there are also many who know its reputation in music. Bromsgrove is a small town in north east Worcestershire (population 90,000) just south west of Birmingham, UK's second largest city (with of course its own formidable history in music). Bromsgrove Concerts is a long established society which promotes a series of chamber concerts involving performers of international status and a series of concerts of new music which feature frequent commissions and many innovations. There is also a biennial weekend of music performance and study, in the latest of which in October 1998 the Beethoven quartets were played by the Coull Quartet.

In 1967 the Festival focused on Shostakovich with the Fifth Symphony played by the CBSO, the 'Cello Sonata Op 40 played by Vladimir Orlov, the Trio Op 67 by the Trio di Bolzano and the First Piano Concerto Op 35 played by the String Orchestra with Harold Taylor himself at the piano. Other concerts included Ravi Shankar who established Indian classical music in UK, and Ronald Stevenson who played his own Passacaglia on DSCH in an 80 minute uninterrupted concert. Harold Taylor was the Artistic Director of the Festival from 1966-80 and was responsible for festivals of which many international venues would be proud.

In fact, Ronald Stevenson (composer, pianist and musicologist) was the link which enabled Harold Taylor to begin the tortuous negotiations to get permission to play the Eleventh Quartet, completed just before Shostakovich's first heart attack in May 1966 and first performed in Leningrad on 28th of that month. Ronald Stevenson put Harold Taylor in touch with Dr Gregori Kogan of the Composers' Union in Moscow. Given the indifferent quality of telephones and postal services at that time and of the significant language difficulties he encountered, it was remarkable that Harold Taylor was able to convince Dr Kogan that Bromsgrove was an important enough cultural centre and that Dr Kogan then persuaded the Union to authorise the release of the parts for the first Western European performance, maybe the first outside the USSR. Even the receipt of the parts was not assured and when the photocopies arrived the brown paper parcel was torn and would not have survived much more handling. Harold Taylor found them half in and half out of his letter box (luckily the weather was dry otherwise much might have been unusable).

Then began the problem of arranging a performance by a quartet of sufficient status to serve the music well. However, no established quartet could be found to fit such a new work into its rehearsal and performance schedules. Perhaps a London venue with the attendant publicity might have been different? In the end the four distinguished musicians listed above, all well known in the UK as individual performers, came together especially for the occasion. They called themselves The London String Quartet but did not play as an ensemble again, each having an established career.

In the UK there was, and still is, a cultural bias towards the capital or international festivals such as Edinburgh; as a result no national critic attended the concert in spite of more than adequate advance notice. The Times' music critic even described a performance in London the following November as the 'Western European Première' and the 'paper of record' chose not to print a correction when informed.

When all this came to light I contacted DSCH using Howard Wilson's subscription e-mail address in Gramophone. This resulted in several contacts including Derek Hulme who told us that the performance had come to light and that the entry shown above would appear in the next edition of the Shostakovich Catalogue. (DH first heard about this première during an interval conversation with Jim Page during the 1992 Brodsky Quartet cycle in London.)

Visitors to the UK can find a lot of music outside the capital and not only in famous centres such as Birmingham's Symphony Hall. In this region you can hear much excellent chamber and instrumental music - with up to two or three concerts on the same day, and all within easy travelling. Bromsgrove is something special, however, and continues to promote regular first performances among the established repertoire. Even if the Festival is not quite what it was in Harold Taylor's time, Bromsgrove Concerts have gone from strength to strength (the Borodin Quartet recently played two Shostakovich quartets to a full house.)

An article and a newspaper review are reproduced below to offer the Journal's readers an insight into contemporary musical opinion:

Programme notes by Harold Taylor -


SHOSTAKOVICH

Beethoven was the first recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal; Shostakovich is the latest. The award was one of the most significant tributes paid to Shostakovich on the occasion of his 60th birthday last September, as it is only given to those rare figures of each generation who, either as creators or interpreters, are universally recognised as having upheld the highest ideals of the art, enshrined in the name of its original dedicatee.

Shostakovich's ability to present what Hindemith describes so fittingly as "some reflection of the message that Schiller and Beethoven gave to mankind 'Be embraced, ye millions!'" stems from his own fervent belief in the essential "morality" of music. The self-evident features of Shostakovich's "style" such as his nationalism, favourite rhythms, etc., do not concern us here; we believe that the works which are to be heard in the next fortnight provide a fair survey of all Shostakovich's essential qualities.

I am particularly pleased that through the kindness of Professor Gregori Kogan and the Union of Soviet Composers, we are able to give the English première of Shostakovich's latest string quartet.

Just as the Fifth Symphony is now recognised as the beginning of a great second period in Shostakovich's creative life, I feel that with the 11th Quartet and the Second 'Cello Concerto, we stand on the threshold of a new and, dare I say, more "spiritual" period of this composer's development. Wherever the path of art leads him in the future, the hearts of concert-goers the world over will go with him, for they know that Shostakovich is "on their side" - on the side of humanity, in a world in which regrettably so much and even some music, is not.



Review from the Birmingham Post April 28th 1967
Bromsgrove Festival at the County High School
By K. W. DOMMETT, Birmingham Post Music Critic


THURSDAY, 27th APRIL at 7-30 pm.
LONDON STRING QUARTET
CARL PINI - violin
JOHN TUNNELL - violin
KEITH CUMMINGS - viola
DOUGLAS CAMERON - cello

Borodin, Shostakovich, Beethoven


Dedicated to the memory of Vasily Shirinsky, late leader of the Beethoven Quartet, this latest quartet of Shostakovich was first heard in Moscow last June. The sparse texture which is a prevailing characteristic of the writing, set in relief by a "fiery folk-style" middle movement, shows the composer in that "soft meditative vein of strange simplicity which one may find in some Russian poets, but perhaps nowhere else in the whole of music." (Terence White Gervais).

If the essence of poetry is "emotion recollected in tranquillity", then this is surely one of the most poetic of Shostakovich's works. The haunting conclusion, in which scraps of previously heard melody die into stillness, is presented with that deceptive simplicity and sureness of touch which characterises a great master in any art form. The predominant brownness of the stage seems to have transmitted itself to the performances last night by the London String Quartet.

Neither the Borodin nor the Beethoven quartets with which the recital began and ended appeared to stimulate the players either to graciousness of tone or the simulation of any real degree of involvement ... With so disappointing a pair of performances it is not possible to say how faithfully Shostakovich's intentions regarding his new quartet were carried out.

The impression created by this predominantly elegiac music, which was receiving its first performance in this country, was one of mild approval. One applauds the composer's skill and his inventiveness while remaining conscious of a feeling of a uniformity of mood, expression and layout that would become monotonous if stretched to any great length.

The Quartet, in an almost obsessively applied (and implied) F minor, is cast in seven continuous sections: introduction, scherzo, recitative, etude (the only really fast music), humoresque, elegy and a long contemplative conclusion.

In the main, the music is derived from the opening lyric theme and its prevailing climate is bleak. The mannerisms, the short glissandi, the widely spaced parts, the long unwinding of the melodies and the comic gestures which one meets with in most of Shostakovich's music are here, but are all used to reinforce the underlying melancholy. The work was first heard in Moscow last June and has not yet been published in this country.


Materials and commentaries kindly supplied by John Millington.

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