Stravinsky and Shostakovich at the Perelman

In my concert-going experience, the two major Russian composers of the 20th Century, Igor Stravinsky and Dmitri Shostakovich, have never appeared on the same program. What's more, I"'ve never seen them advertised together anywhere.

No doubt they have so appeared, and for all I know they may do so regularly, for example in Russia itself. It's just that, to my admittedly limited and defective knowledge, I'm unaware of its actually having happened.

Stravinsky, of course, was persona non grata in the Soviet Union until the Khrushchev thaw, and he never set foot there until 1962. Shostakovich, on the other hand, had not left it for 20 years, until he was trotted out in 1949 for propaganda purposes at the so-called Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York, an event Stravinsky boycotted.

The two composers didn't meet until Stravinsky's 1962 visit, and then only briefly and rather formally. Shostakovich confessed his admiration to Stravinsky, which had included references to Stravinsky's The Firebird and Oedipus Rex in his Fourth Symphony, and the piano reduction he had made of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. The Shostakovich Fourth Symphony, long banned, had received its first performance only in 1961, and so the score was newly fresh in Shostakovich's mind when he met Stravinsky. We know he mentioned the piano reduction to Stravinsky as well.

Profound differences, but….

Stravinsky didn't reciprocate Shostakovich's appreciation, and no such relation sprang up between them (as did that between Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten). Their musical and social personalities were quite unlike, and they belonged to different generations. Certainly their life experiences had been profoundly different.

At our present remove, however, we can better see affinity as well as difference. Recent studies of Stravinsky have emphasized his abiding Russianness. Expatriates, too, belong to their native soil; who would say that Nabokov was not a Russian?

As for Shostakovich, immured as he was in Stalin's Russia, his music continually reached out across his country's borders, incorporating polytonality, jazz and other "decadent" Western elements in the 1920s and 1930s, and more tactfully referencing the Western tradition by quotation and homage when avant-garde experimentation was no longer possible.

Stravinsky, then, was a cosmopolitan who never severed his connection with Russia, and Shostakovich was a Russian who saw himself as firmly within the Western tradition.

Who's the conservative?

The good news is that Stravinsky and Shostakovich have at last been brought together, at least on a Philadelphia concert program, by another gentleman with a famous Russian name, Ignat Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn, whose departure from the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia a year ago has left it and us the poorer, offered a program for the Chamber Music Society with two fellow musicians— violinist Jennifer Frautschi and cellist Efe Baltacigil— that consisted of two works apiece by Stravinsky and Shostakovich, with one of each on each half of the program.

If you knew nothing of either composer, the first half of the program would have suggested that Shostakovich was the aggressive modernist, and Stravinsky the musical conservative.

Stravinsky's Suite Italienne (1923) is a five-movement reduction of music from his ballet, Pulcinella, arranged for cello and piano, and based in turn on themes of the 18th-Century composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. It's a highly charming and agreeable score, but at this point poses few problems even for the listener whose tastes stop with the 19th Century.

His teachers were appalled

The Shostakovich Piano Sonata # 1, on the other hand, is hardly less dense and thorny than it was when the 20-year-old composer wrote it in 1926. Its furious energies are packed into a single, quarter-hour movement, and even its quieter passages give little evidence of conventional melody or harmonic resolution. Berg and Bartok were writing nothing knottier, and Shostakovich's teachers at the Leningrad Conservatory, where he had just taken his degree and where Glazunov was still the reigning presence, were dumfounded and appalled.

Was Shostakovich playing the enfant terrible? No doubt to a point, but the music is anything but flippant, and it left the Perelman audience somewhat at a gasp— not least because of Solzhenitsyn's bravura performance.

Blood on the keyboard

Why Shostakovich didn't pursue this vein, at least beyond his Second Symphony, is anybody's guess. Presumably he wanted to show that he could be as avant-garde as anyone; but the high-water mark of musical modernism had already been reached, and a more conservative idiom was soon to assert itself. Stravinsky's neo-classicism was already evidence of this reaction, and anyone wanting to measure the changed musical atmosphere need only consult the difference between Prokofiev's Second Symphony (1924) and his Third (1928).

Nonetheless, the Shostakovich First Sonata is much more than a curiosity. Shostakovich thought well of it and performed it at his own concerts. The story is that he left blood on the keys at the premiere. One can well believe it.

Astonishing at age 16

The second half of the program opened with Stravinsky's Duo Concertant (1932) for violin and piano, a much more severe and more intellectually formidable work than the Suite Italienne, which rises to a genuine if austere lyricism only in its extended finale.

The Shostakovich in this half was the Piano Trio # 1 in C minor, Opus 8, his presentation piece for admission to the Leningrad Conservatory. It, too, like his Piano Sonata, is in a single movement of about 15 minutes, and its eclecticism shows the varied strands of postwar Russian music as assimilated by an astonishing young talent—Shostakovich was all of 16 when he wrote it.

Its piano writing contains touches of Scriabin, and the music goes on a little beyond its developmental ideas, but it is still a striking work and of great historic interest. All three musicians were united in it for the first time, and all distinguished themselves throughout the concert.

So, Igor and Dmitri, well met, and well served. These two giants, separated in life by war and revolution, can speak now in music. It's a dialogue that should be continued.