Sinfonia for Viola and Strings in Bb minor (arrangement by Alexander Tchaikovsky of String Quartet No. 13, opus 138); Brahms: Clarinet [Viola] Quintet in B minor, opus 115 (transcribed by Yuri Bashmet; reduction of double bass part by Yuri Golubev).
Yuri Bashmet (viola), The Moscow Soloists.
SONY ASK 60550-S1. DDD. TT 65:11.
Recorded 21-22 March, 1998, Henry Wood Hall, London.
World première recordings.

Shostakovich's Thirteenth Quartet, with its alternately grim, gritty and grotesque turns of expression, seems a most unlikely candidate for chamber transcription. Yet, through the zealous efforts of both arranger and performers, this most unusual entry in the Shostakovich canon receives a uniquely impressive representation in this new Sony release featuring Yuri Bashmet and the Moscow Soloists.

With this recording, chamber arrangements of no less than seven different Shostakovich quartets have appeared on CD. To my knowledge these consist of Quartets No. 3 (Barshai, chamber orch.) , No. 4 (Barshai, chamber orch.), No. 7 (Paul Archibald, brass quintet), No. 8 (Barshai and others), No. 10 (Barshai), No. 13 (A.Tchaikovsky, this release) and No. 15 (Misha Rachlevsky, strings). The much overworked Eighth Quartet leads the rest in recorded versions, with the Tenth Quartet coming in a close second. Transcriptions, even the least fitting, are themselves interpretations in that they present opportunities for new perspectives on familiar works. That is why they pique our curiosity. In the current offering, transcription is combined with a set of boldly different performance decisions, providing not one, but two levels of interpretive departure for consideration.

The setting of Quartet No. 13 for viola and strings was prepared by the Moscow-born (1946) composer Alexander Tchaikovsky (apparently no relation to either Piotr, Boris or Andre of musical reputation*), some of whose compositions (a piano trio, a piano fantasia and a clarinet concerto) have appeared on the Melodiya label. The choice of viola as featured instrument ties in with the fact that Shostakovich had dedicated each of his last quartets to a different member of the Beethoven Quartet and each contains a prominent part for the instrument of its dedicatee. In the case of Quartet No.13 (1970), it was violist Vadim Vasilievich Borisovsky, who had retired from the ensemble in 1964 and who died in 1972.

The Thirteenth Quartet is one of the grief-stricken, yet potent works of the composer's later years which, like the Twelfth Quartet, Fourteenth Symphony and Violin Sonata, led the composer to push his musical language to its chromatic extreme. In these works, Shostakovich dabbled in the serialist's palette without ever losing his diatonic footing, deploying tone rows in a lyrical framework that opened up new avenues of expressive severity. The dark abyss from which these works emerged also inspired bold new experiments in form, of which the Thirteenth Quartet is perhaps the boldest. Here we have Shostakovich's only experiment in full-scale symmetry, a single movement work whose five sections are arranged, mirror-like, in successively increasing and decreasing tempo around a central section of highly contrasting material. In Shostakovich's hands, the symmetry is not used as an artifact of neoclassicism, but rather as a unique and ingeniously exploited expressive opportunity.

Though the album refers to the arrangement as one for 'viola and strings', the liner notes provide no information whatsoever about the details of the scoring or the instrumental make-up of the Moscow Soloists. Among the distinguishing features of Mr. Tchaikovsky's arrangement, though, is its lightness of touch. In other transcriptions of the composer's quartets, one finds, to varying degrees, a uniform thickening of texture throughout so that one is always aware of added instrumental weight. In the current arrangement, the presence of the ensemble is so gently blended into the background that its effect is to add highlighting while meticulously preserving the work's intimate quality. In fact, entire passages, solo and otherwise, seem to appear in their original scoring as dictated by the expressive needs of the moment. The results are subtle and most effective.

One feature that stands out in particular is the presence of the double bass, whose reinforcement of the cello part adds a wonderfully resonant gravity to the work's dark ambience. The instrument also enhances some of the more atmospheric effects such as the eerie trills (Fig. 48/16:09) and widely spaced 'ghost' chords (Fig. 59/23:33) in the final section.

The featured viola part is neither used in a bravura manner nor excessively pushed to the foreground. It is, at times, given a part originally written for one or another string, a feature which sacrifices some of the notable instrumental interplay throughout the quartet.

The aspect of this recording that departs considerably from the norm is the performance itself, where the daringly broad tempi taken in the outer movements bring the total timing of the work to an astonishing 27:33. Compare this with the timings of the Beethoven (18:12; Consonance 813008), Borodin (19:56; Melodiya 74321-40711-2), and Fitzwilliam (19:11; Decca/London 289455776-2) Quartets' recordings of same. The expansive tempi do rob the work of much of its dramatic sweep and transforms the outer section into a kind of pensive dirge reminiscent of the adagios of the Fifteenth Quartet.

Listeners' reactions to this approach will vary, but I found myself responding positively after a number of playings. Mr. Bashmet and the Moscow Soloists pour so much emotion and nuanced dynamics into these sections that they are able to carry the line with considerable sustaining force. The listener is also able to savor, as in no other performance, the painful yet exquisitely graceful stream of dissonant sonorities that shade the broad lines of the work's outer sections.

The approach is not without its tradeoffs. The principal one of these is that, in its expanded gesture, the stabbing three note figures which are repeated throughout the second and fourth sections lose some of their anguished fury, even if they do acquire a compensatingly larger-than-life quality. In the second section, a series of pile-on sonorities should bring these stabbing motifs to a wrenching crux, an effect which is somewhat neutralized in the current performance. As a result the manner in which the second section leads to the third, through a pointilistically dissolving segue, loses some of its dramatic (though not lyric) continuity.

The jazzily syncopated central section of the Quartet is not subject to the same tempo extensions, nor could it be. The borrowed idiom insists upon a certain 'swing', a finger-snapping 'beat', without which the contradictory layers of meaning imposed upon it would be lost. In this strange and memorable episode, the low string beats out a steadily pulsed pizzicato vamp (itself a tone row) in 4/4 time while the upper-register instruments engage in a jerky, syncopated Dance of Death to the accompaniment of falling jazz-like riffs and hollow percussive raps on the bellies of the instruments (struck by the back of the bow). The split semantic levels of jazzy scherzo humor imposed upon a sort of hysterical, marionette-like dislocation grows in climactic intensity at Fig. 28/12:50 when a series of broadly arched phrases adds yet a further layer of heightened emotion. The Moscow Soloists' handling of this section is most stirring. The plucking bass brings along its own jazz associations and works particularly well.

In the final section of the work, the material from the first section returns, its level of despair intensified rather than relieved for the experience. The viola solo's doleful swan song has never sounded so stripped of hope and unconsoled as it does in Mr. Bashmet's broadly drawn lines.

One feature of this arrangement which I take issue with is on the very last note. In the final bars of the original score, the strings leap up a tritone from E natural (two octaves above middle E) to a sustained Bb above. In the original score, the Bb is held with steadily increasing volume and then is abruptly cut off in a final sforzando. In Mr. Tchaikovsky's arrangement, the final cut-off is topped off with a short, added accented note played by other strings, an embellishment which destroys the pure effect of a lone voice crying out into the darkness and suddenly silenced. While Shostakovich tolerated, even approved of, various instrumental arrangements of his music, we know from Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered that he would object to the smallest deviation from the special instrumental effects in his quartet music (see Valentin Berlinsky's account of such an instance, p.245). The rest of the arrangement withstanding, I somehow think that the final 'topping off' note might not have received the master's imprimatur.

That aside, the performance is one whose daringly broad tempi are likely to test a listener's patience and just as likely to reward it. This is an earnest and heartfelt performance that lends a fresh emotional perspective to one of the lesser known works of the composer's canon, one worth hearing more than just a few times. That combined with the lovingly performed Brahms clarinet quintet in its viola arrangement add up to a very worthwhile purchase.

[* in DSCH No. 6, Winter 1996, p. 4, Irina Shostakovich is interviewed as saying "More recently Boris Tchaikovsky made an excellent arrangement of the 13th String Quartet for viola and string orchestra." Either she momentarily had Alexander confused with Boris, which I feel is the case, or there exists yet another arrangement of same work by the better known of the two Tchaikovsky's.]

Louis Blois
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