Violin Sonatas

I don't know another recording of the Viola Sonata but would love to hear another so measured and moving. The power of the playing is fantastic and, I think, authentic in the sense that it captures all the creative frustration so often evident in Shostakovich's music.

Here is a man whose lifelong experience was to be thwarted by tyranny,and now facing death, along with the inevitable despair and anger what humour and humanity remains - great.

The violin sonata is also wonderful. It is satirical, cynical and full of frustrated life. Like the viola sonata it expresses deeply considered and thwarted passion while retaining a real faith in life and the ability to compose AND maintains a sense of beauty and of humour - a thumb and a genius tweaked at all authority.

I have listened again and again to these two pieces and will do so still. They lead you to re-examine all the more familiar Shostakovich with a new ear: not to mention Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata!

All three players, live, keep control and provide fantastic performances - buy it!

I have been playing these quite intensively over the last month or so, and they have lately made the transition between being very interesting pieces of music to a drug that I can't get enough of. Both are recordings of live performances that have the palpable atmosphere of a quasi-religious event. If ever there was an artefact that illustrated the essence of atheistic spirituality it is this disc.

The Violin Sonata Op.134 (1968) opens with a slow and twisting tone row on the piano, which is joined by a slower and complementary tone row on the violin. As absolute music, I have come to find these passages as mesmerising as the eyes of a python, brimming with possibilities and implications. Emotionally, they seem inescapably the rueful reflections of old age. After a couple of cycles of this extended theme we shift abruptly to `Russian' folk/popular music of a sometimes comic character. This more lively music eventually peters out giving way to a sinuous descending serial figure that is followed by a couple of rasping gasps on the violin, the effect of which is unmistakably creepy. The opening section now resumes, but with roles reversed, allowing the piano to explore the gloomy domain a little, before a repeat of the sinuous descending figure and gasps allows the movement to recede into twilight.

The second movement is utterly extraordinary, equal in brilliance to anything else in Shostokovich's oeuvre. Fragments of Russian popular tunes are smashed together to create an ever more frantic whirlwind, culminating in moments of panic and terror, reminiscent of his Stalin music of Symphony No.10 and elsewhere. The tightness of the increasingly chromatic counterpoint between the two instruments is astonishing, and unlike anything else I can think of in the violin sonata repertoire. I find myself visualising the sort of ephemeral debris that so fascinated the creators of those old futurist collages, but all picked up and hurled about by a whirling cyclone.

The final movement is a theme and variations which explores a diversity of moods and landscapes, beginning quite diffidently but gradually growing in confidence and authority. It culminates in solo variations for each instrument of passionate intensity, in both cases brilliant and clearly at the extremes of virtuosity. The movement then rapidly subsides into spent exhaustion, until being underlined with the sinuous descending figure and gasps of the first movement, but these gasps are truly the last.

The Viola Sonata, Op.147 (1975), written from his hospital bed, whilst succumbing to the final stages of lung cancer, is altogether less technically brilliant in character, but almost infinitely soulful. It begins with quiet pizzicato figures from the violin moving into music that is forlorn but self contained. There is no fear or anxiety. Then comes an eruption of fretful passion, fraught with impotent rage and rancour. But the energy of the outburst is soon spent and the music collapses back into a rueful resignation. An eerie tremolo figure announces the icy hand of death, and we then unwind back through the music with which we opened, like a clock running down, until we find ourselves at the pizzicato figures with which we began, and then silence.

The central movement begins in his Russian folk-popular idiom; lively, robust, almost even gay. Somehow though this drops through into something quiet and secretive, that slowly transforms into a blossoming of pride, and even a cautious joyfulness. This music eventually subsides to move without pause into the final movement.

This final movement is a miracle that every true music lover should know of. It is Shostakovich at his most visionary and poetic, and shows an artist blessed with the rare privilege of ending his life on his own terms. It was completed literally in his final days such that by the time its dedicatee came to play it for him it was too late. The movement is essentially a homage to Beethoven, beginning with slow stately piano arpeggios over which the violin plays a theme unmistakably referencing the Moonlight Sonata. The music develops into a place of passionate pleading, which somehow mutates into a luminous acceptance. What follows is a profound meditation on dignity, summarised by a viola solo that is at once highly abstract and yet intensely personal. Shostakovich seems here to address the individual listener with a total frankness, expressing from one human heart to another an infinitude of things about the totality of life that couldn't even begin to be said with words. Upon completion of this valedictory statement the Moonlight arpeggios resume, which gradually fade into utter serenity. At the end one is aware of an awe-struck silence in the hall, and the applause builds slowly as if the audience is emerging from a dream.

The previous reviewer has said nearly all I want to say but the main reason I want to write a review of my own for this disc is to repeat and underline his final instruction -buy it.I also have not heard another version of the viola sonata and am tempted to utter a heresy for cd collectors and say I don't need to.I will at some stage search out another but won't expect better than this live performance from two consummate musicians who, in the Beethoven saluting finale of the Viola Sonata, Shostakovich's swan-song, achieve a veritably sacred atmosphere of music making.