Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, op. 67[a]; String Quartet No. 1 in C major, op. 49[b]; Piano Quintet in G minor, op. 57[c].
St. Petersburg String Quartet: Alla Aranovskaya (violin 1)[a-c], Ilya Teplyakov (violin 2)[b,c], Alexei Koptev (viola)[b,c], Leonid Shukaev (cello)[a-c]; Igor Uryash (piano)[a,c].
Hyperion CDA 67158. DDD. TT 76:15.
Recorded St. Petersburg Recording Studio, December 2003.

This is the final volume of the St. Petersburg Quartet's Hyperion cycle of Shostakovich Quartets, which has been generally well-received by reviewers. The St. Petersburg players are fine instrumentalists, and their warmth has been well captured by Hyperion's recording. The issue for some listeners may be whether beauty of sound is given too much emphasis in these performances, with the result that some of the music's strangeness and originality is lost. The First Quartet, Piano Quintet and Second Trio were written between 1938 and 1944, from the end of the Great Terror until the latter part of the Second World War. Shostakovich's world includes much more than shimmering beauty and it sometimes seems that the St. Petersburg players are unwilling to look unflinchingly at its complexity.

The problem looms largest with the composer's Piano Trio No. 2, written near the end of the war. Much of the Trio is dance music, but it dances ironically, even ghoulishly, and its dances are framed by moments of horrified grief, as might be felt when confronting unspeakable devastation. The Trio opens with such a moment. The solo cello, seemingly stunned into inarticulateness, is heard in false harmonics, which cellist Leonid Shukaev plays beautifully. Violinist Alla Aranovskaya does not seem to share or respect the cello's grief, however. Her sound warms up quickly and she soon covers Shukaev's harmonics, her assertiveness intruding on the numbness of this special opening moment. The main Moderato section of the movement begins a little more slowly than the marked tempo but the St. Petersburg players insert a sudden and unmarked accelerando and the rest of the movement is played much faster than marked: about crotchet = 192, instead of the marked tempi of 120 and 138.

Telling comparisons are the composer's own first recording of the Trio, made in 1946 with Dmitry Tsyganov and Sergey Shirinsky of the Beethoven Quartet (Doremi DHR-7787; reviewed in DSCH No. 18) and a fine recent disc by the Trio Wanderer (Harmonia mundi HMC 901825; reviewed above). In both of these, the cello's opening is followed by hushed entries in both the violin and piano, which share instead of displacing the cello's shock. The Trio Wanderer gives the cellist time to recuperate slowly, so that even when cellist Raphaël Pidoux comes out of his harmonics, he is able to keep his sound covered and tentative. The Wanderers then begin the Moderato quite slowly, enhancing the sense of emerging with difficulty from their stunned beginning.

In contrast, Shostakovich and the Beethoven Quartet members begin the Moderato very quickly, much faster than the marked tempo (which may very well have been annotated after this early recording), maintaining the same tempo as the movement progresses, so that at times the music seems to stagnate in the middle of the movement. By the time of the composer's 1947 recording with David Oistrakh and Milos Sádlo (Doremi DHR-7701 and Eclectra ECCD-2046; reviewed in DSCH No. 14), the composer had settled on a gradual tempo change from Adagio to Moderato to poco più mosso. This pacing, which makes musical and emotional sense, is reflected in the tempo markings shown in the score, but these have been disregarded by the St. Petersburg ensemble.

The St. Petersburg players create a lovely, inward-exploring third-movement passacaglia. In the second-movement scherzo and finale the St. Petersburgs also play beautifully, at times excitingly, but often without the grotesque undercurrent that makes this music more complex than other Slavic folk-inflected works like the Dvorák Dumky Trio. Thus, their scherzo is slow in comparison to the marked tempo and loses the sense of frantic hanging-on-by-your-fingernails that is found in the composer's recording.

The St. Petersburgs' finale is also comparatively slow, almost gentle. The string sound is beautiful, but the St. Petersburgs' luxuriant vibrato seems inappropriate in this context. The players' pizzicato accompaniments lack energy, becoming almost lethargic at times (although first violinist Aranovskaya's pizzicati at the opening of the finale are wonderfully jarring). In contrast, the Wanderers' pizzicati are amazingly varied, at times jarringly twangy (at the finale's beginning), at times huge, thwacking off-beats, but always dynamic and involved. Nuances of vibrato in the Wanderers' bowed passages create bizarre shadings. Short notes remain short in the piano, making its quiet spots downright spooky, not just mysterious. Overall, in comparison, the St. Petersburgs' interpretation sounds quite bland and tame. The Trio Wanderer's recording is grand, and I would certainly recommend it over the St. Petersburg ensemble, both for its sensitive performance of the Shostakovich's Second Piano Trio and for its couplings.

All recordings of the Piano Quintet must contend with Shostakovich's own prize-winning performance with the Beethoven Quartet (Doremi DHR-7787; reviewed in DSCH No. 18). This 1955 recording, which benefits from the performers' fifteen years of Quintet performances, has great assurance in its overall shaping and pacing. The delicate interaction between Shostakovich and Tsyganov gives a wonderful insight (often missing from the Beethovens' too-early quartet recordings) as to why these players were so important to Shostakovich. The St. Petersburgs' slow tempi add six minutes to the composer's 29-minute timing and they are even slower than those of the Borodin Quartet with Sviatoslav Richter (in the Borodins' CD set of all fifteen quartets, BMG/Melodiya 74321 40713 2; deleted). The St. Petersburg players, however, lack the Borodins' extraordinary intensity, so it is not surprising that their Prelude seems to get bogged down. They take a faster tempo in the second-movement fugue, and thus lose the prelude-and-fugue sense that the composer achieves by keeping a steady tempo through the two movements. But the St. Petersburgs' second movement does have wonderful moments where they find stillness and intimacy.

I want the scherzo to be an extraordinarily rude intrusion after the fugue's quiet conclusion, and the St. Petersburg players are, to my taste, far too polite - neither fast and exciting like the composer's 1955 recording, nor percussively stompy and ominous like the Borodins'. The St. Petersburgs' Intermezzo is lovely, but at the end they stop (or their recording engineer does) and there is a moment of complete silence before pianist Igor Uryash begins the finale. This he takes much too quickly, his opening tempo completely unrelated to that of the Intermezzo. Although his playing is often fine, Uryash here mutilates the radiant transition to the finale and misses the Quintet's great arrival moment, captured exquisitely both by the composer and Richter. This seems like criminal insensitivity on Uryash's part and, when combined with the St. Petersburgs' generally bland performance, provides good reason to recommend that readers look elsewhere for a recording of the Piano Quintet.

The St. Petersburgs' First Quartet, like the rest of the disc, is filled with lush lyricism. Its first movement is much faster than the composer's uncomfortably slow 80-to-a-crotchet marking and the St. Petersburgs' playing flows along nicely and quite romantically. There seems to have been a deliberate decision on their part to play down some of the stranger aspects of the score, which were much more apparent in their 1994 recording (with String Quartets Nos. 2 and 4 on Sony St. Petersburg Classics SK 64584; deleted) and which gave greater emphasis to the first movement's occasional troubling dissonances. The scherzo of this earlier recording also moved at a truly breakneck speed, thus seeming all the more unnerving and frightened.

It seems a pity that the St. Petersburg Quartet has evolved to the rather uninteresting approach to Shostakovich shown on this most recent offering, as they are clearly capable and sensitive players. But, in my view, this disc offers little that is new or interesting in a competitive field where more imaginative versions of all of these works are available.

Judy Kuhn
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DSCH No. 22.
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