Passacaglia
Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936)
Violin Sonata in B minor, P.110 (1917)
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Violin Sonata in G major, Op 134 (1968)
Pavel Berman (violin), Maria Meerovitch (piano)
rec. 2023, Paliesius Studio Residence (Latvia)
Orchid Classics ORC 100262 [57]
Foolishly, I was briefly puzzled as to why this disc of violin sonatas by two very different composers should carry the title Passacaglia. The answer is really quite simple: in both sonatas, the closing movement is in the form of a passacaglia. In almost every other respect, the two works are very different. Respighi’s sonata is the work of a relatively young composer and, in part at least, it communicates his joy in his own abilities. On the other hand, Shostakovich’s sonata is the work of a much older man (in his sixties), in whom illness made him already conscious of the approach of death.
If I had to choose a single adjective to characterise Respighi’s music, it would, I think, be polystylistic. Both across the range of his output and sometimes within a single work, he draws on a remarkable variety of models and influences and, at his best, moulds them into coherent musical wholes. Some have described his work as excessively derivative and lacking in any real individuality; one such is the Italian critic and musicologist Guido M. Gatti, writing in Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music (OUP, 1930, pp.289-90): “Unfortunately it is difficult to analyse what is left of Respighi’s music when all that pertains to craftsmanship has been eliminated […] This expert composer is successful in concealing the various sources of his musical ideas, but he never really stirs the emotions or utters a word which we feel to be entirely his own”. Given our experience of postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon, it is, I think, now easier to understand and sympathise with what Respighi was doing. Though it is perhaps too glib to say so, one might even describe Respighi as a postmodernist avant la lettre, rather as his approximate contemporary Charles Ives was. Unlike Gatti, quoted above, I take the view that the very nature of Respighi’s creativity was grounded in acts of synthesis and juxtaposition which produce music different from any one of his ‘models’. His orchestral tone poems fuse influences such as Rimsky-Korsakov (with whom he studied briefly in Moscow) and Richard Strauss. On the other hand, works such as the Concerto gregoriano (1921) and the Quartetto dorico (1924) make use of plainchant and early church modes. Conversely, while the suites making up his Antiche arie e danze (1917-1923) are based on Renaissance works for the lute by composers such as Vincenzo Gallileo, Bernardo Gianoncelli and Santino Garsi di Parma. To take one last example, Gli Uccelli (1928) reworks composition by Bernardo Pasquini, Jean-Philippe Rameau and Jacques de Gallot.
In his Violin Sonata in B minor, Respighi incorporates a number of different styles, without directly reusing specific models in the manner of several of the works alluded to above. At the risk of over-simplification, one can say that the first movement (Moderato) owes more than a little to late romanticism; it shares some of its colours with Respighi’s La Fontane di Roma (1916) and with César Franck. In the lyrical writing of the second movement (Andante espressivo) we have an odd but satisfying fusion of the lyricism of Italian opera and French impressionism. The aforementioned passacaglia which closes the work is grounded in the Baroque use of the form, notably by J S Bach, though its most direct model may be the closing movement of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony.
Violinist Pavel Berman and pianist Maria Meerovitch prove themselves to be insightful and technically assured interpreters of Respighi’s sonata. Both musicians were born in Russia (Berman in Moscow and Meerovitch in St. Petersburg) though both are now based in Western Europe. Berman, for instance, teaches at the Conservatorio della Svizera Italiano in Lugano and at the Academia Perosi in Biella (in Northern Italy), while Meerovitch has worked extensively as a soloist in Europe, the USA and Asia.
I had full confidence in Berman and Meerovitch from the early bars of the first movement. The opening movement of Respighi’s Sonata (Moderato) begins with some rhapsodically beautiful writing for the violin, in which Berman’s tone and phrasing are engaging and impressive. The mood of troubled introspection is captured to something like perfection. The second movement (Andante espressivo) opens with a long passage for piano alone. It is perhaps relevant at this point to remember that Respighi was accomplished both as a violinist (the instrument he played professionally) and as a pianist. Perhaps for this reason, he seems to have been loath to subordinate the piano to the violin in this sonata. Maria Meerovitch clearly relishes this long introduction to the lyrical second movement and brings out the thoughtful beauty of Respighi’s quiet and well-developed theme, before the violin enters with a melody both peaceful and expressive. The judgement of tempo and dynamics by both performers makes this entry a moment of seamless beauty. Thereafter, the music, in triple-time, increases in vigour and force in the section marked espressivo. Throughout this rich central movement (the beating heart of the sonata) Berman and Meerovitch handle the various transitions with a kind of relaxed precision which makes the movement feel almost organic.
The adjective which the closing movement brings to mind is not so much ‘organic’ as ‘learned’. Even Guido M. Gatti in the passage referred to earlier concedes, in relation to this sonata, that “the passacaglia which forms this third movement is perhaps most worthy of mention, and certain passages […] afford proof of Respighi’s early mastery over form”. The movement begins with a rigorous statement of the passacaglia theme, with its dotted rhythms. This seems to be an original theme; the way in which Respighi treats his theme is well-described in Joanna Wyld’s valuable and well-written booklet note accompanying this disc: “with characteristic flair [Respighi] varies the mood by lightening the texture to create witty contrast, or by unfurling a leisurely, romantic passage that slowly darkens, returning us to the opening atmosphere for a dramatic coda”. Berman and Meerovitch negotiate this movement with exemplary clarity and thoughtfully expressive playing.
The chamber music of Respighi is much less well-known than his works for orchestra. Yet this relatively early work (written when he was still establishing his reputation as a composer) is an ambitious and largely successful work. While it cannot be said that this sonata has become a regularly played part of the chamber repertoire, it has certainly attracted the attention of distinguished performers. So, for example, Jascha Heifetz recorded it, with pianist Emanuel Bay, for RCA in 1950. There have also been a number of good recordings in more recent times. Some (in no particular order) are those by Kyung Wha Chung and Kristian Zimmerman (DG 457 907-2), James Ehnes and Andrew Armstrong (review), Tasmin Little and Piers Lane (review) and Tamsin Waley-Chen with Huw Watkins (review). This new recording, however, bears comparison with any of these, given that the interpretative judgements of Berman and Meerovitch are everywhere perceptive and the ‘shape’ of each of the three movements is articulated very successfully. I have enjoyed this performance more with every hearing and I feel sure that I will return to it often.
Shostakovich’s late violin sonata takes us into a world far removed from Respighi’s polystylistic recuperation of a range of musical idioms. This sonata has, rather, a profound unity of style, being wholly expressed in the bare (one might say gaunt) idiom characteristic of most of Shostakovich’s late work, music stripped of all not absolutely essential to the purpose in hand.
The sonata was written late in 1968 and dedicated to David Oistrakh. A first performance, in front of a private audience, by Oistrakh with Moisei Weinberg [Miesczylaw Weinberg] at the piano was given in January 1969 under the auspices of the Union of Soviet Composers. The official, public premiere followed in May 1969, in the Moscow Conservatory with Oistrakh, this time joined by Sviatoslav Richter.
Initially, Shostakovich titled the three movements ‘Pastorale’, ‘Allegro furioso’ and ‘Variations on a Theme’, but subsequently withdrew these titles in favour of simple Roman numerals and basic tempo markings – ‘Andante’, ‘Allegro furioso’ and ‘Largo’. This action might serve as an emblem of how Shostakovich stripped the music of this sonata back to its bare essentials.
The predominant austerity of manner is established early in the first movement. Surely the original marking ‘Pastorale’ can only have been intended ironically? If imagined in ‘pastoral’ terms, this music could only be understood as making reference to brief, impoverished and hungry peasant lives in which there were only few (and weak) glimpses of any kind of hope? We are a long, long way away here from the idealised lives lived by shepherds in the idyllic world of classical pastoral. The tempo is slow throughout; indeed, there are moments in this fine performance when it is almost funereal. There is a markedly introspective quality to much of the writing: Berman and Meerovitch give painfully persuasive expression to the bleak music of this spiritually isolated world, in which we hear, on more than one occasion, what sounds like the ringing of funeral bells.
By way of contrast, at least in tempo, the second movement lives up to the composer’s original designation of ‘Allegro furioso’, not least when its dramatically energetic opening sets up an almost violent contrast with what has gone before. Unlike the ‘funeral’ music of the first movement, we now find ourselves in the midst of what feels like a kind of demented wedding dance;: Berman and Meerovitch capture this in well-nigh perfect fashion. In a note in the Boosey and Hawkes publication of the score of this sonata, Gerard McBurney sees this central movement as related to Shostakovich’s enthusiasm for klezmer wedding music. He writes that it “suggests a terrifying dance in which aggression and intense sympathy are held in a dangerously unstable balance until the movement hammers towards a tragic climax”. This, it seems to me, is both very perceptive and very well said. Might one go on to say that the first movement is ‘about’ the failure of the pastoral ideal and the second ‘about’ the precarious nature of love? Both the pastoral and marriage are essentially forms of the comic (think of Shakespeare), whereas this sonata occupies the antithetical realm of tragedy. But it does so, as the closing movement makes clear, with a kind of Stoic dignity.
This sonata was written at a time when the composer’s health was declining seriously, compelling him to consider the approaching reality of his death. After a heart attack in 1966, Shostakovich’s music showed an increasing preoccupation with mortality. Sometimes the subject is made explicit – as in his Symphony No 14, Op 135, which sets 11 poems about death, by poets including Lorca, Apollinaire and Rilke. After the writing of this symphony in 1969 (the year after this sonata was composed) Shostakovich, in a letter to his friend Isaak Glikman, reported that he had written the work quickly. He was “afraid something would happen to me, like, for instance, my right hand would give up working altogether, or I’d suddenly go blind or something” (quoted thus by Mark Wigglesworth: Mark’s notes on Shostakovich Symphony No 14 – Mark Wigglesworth). That same shadow of death also informs the violin sonata. In fact, Shostakovich had a second heart attack in 1971 and in 1972-3 he was treated for lung cancer; in the months before his death in August 1975 his right hand was paralysed.
The proximity of inevitable death produced in Shostakovich neither meek acceptance – he would not bow down before death any more than he had bowed down before Stalin – nor a rage “against the dying of the light”. Instead, he chose to affirm, musically, that ‘death shall have no dominion’ – though, of course, his sense of how that might be true is quite different from Romans 6:9. The nearness of death prompted Shostakovich to raise a monument to the enduring value of music and life. The last movement of this violin sonata is just such a monument, especially in its hugely imposing passacaglia which, in its fugal writing, seems to claim descent from one of the fountainheads of Shostakovich’s music: J S Bach, especially his chorales, some works for organ and the great Chaconne which closes the Second Partita for violin. As the final movement of the sonata approaches its end, we hear again the tolling bells of the first movement, before the music fades into silence. The whole serves to affirm the enduring value of music, of resistance and of a life lived with integrity.
Throughout, Berman and Meerovitch respond impressively to the considerable challenges posed by the music. As in the Respighi, I admire their ability to embody the ‘shape’ of each movement and work, without either neglecting any of the constituent details or being distracted from the larger design by them. I have not encountered any previous recordings by this duo, (if any reader knows of any, I would be delighted to learn of them), but I certainly hope that there will be more.
As is the case with the Respighi sonata, there are several other recordings of the Shostakovich sonata available. The recordings by David Oistrakh have a unique and special status, but there have also been other fine recordings in more recent years. Amongst those, I know that by Lydia Mordkovich and Clifford Benson, issued in 1990 (Chandos 8988) which is perhaps the very best; I have also been favourably impressed by the 2018 recording by Sebastian Bohren and Igor Karško (RCA Red Seal G0100316 S421H) and, from a year later, the version by Franziska Pietsch and Josu De Solaun (Audite 97759).
This pairing of sonatas by Respighi and Shostakovich seems to be unique and proves to be an illuminating one. It is a disc of real quality – full of thoughtfully intelligent playing in well recorded sound, with a thoroughly appropriate acoustic.
Glyn Pursglove
Help us financially by purchasing from
