Czech Chamber Music Society • Bell, Isserlis, Kissin

The founding of the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire in 1862 began one of the most interesting chapters of Russian music history. Beforehand, music had mainly been taught privately, in court ensembles, or by church choirs. Now, for the first time, a conservatoire was offering systematic, European-oriented training to instrumentalists, singers, and composers. The three graduates of that school chosen for today’s programme—Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Solomon Rosowsky, and Dmitri Shostakovich—represent three different generations from contrasting cultural and musical worlds, but at the same time they share in common the distinctive spirit of an important musical institution.

Exactly 40 years after the school was founded, the school’s composition department admitted Solomon Rosowsky (1878–1962), the son of the cantor Baruch-Leib Rozowsky, who had himself once studied at the conservatoire and was a contemporary of Tchaikovsky. Already as a student, Solomon Rosovsky stood apart from others by striving to merge classical composition technique with the traditions of Jewish music. One such example is a work he wrote in 1907 while still at the conservatoire: the Fantastic Dance on a Hebrew Theme for piano trio, Op. 6, which weds Hassidic melodic traditions with a European instrumental form. A lengthy cello recitative is followed by a violin melody evoking the singing of a cantor with characteristic melismas and modal colouring. A quicker dance section then provides contrast with the earlier passages with their strong vocal stylisation. This combination of liturgical and secular elements of Jewish musical traditions gives the composition an attractive, unique quality. He dedicated the work to his father. From 1925, Rosowsky worked in Jerusalem, then he emigrated to the United States, where he earned a reputation not only for composing, but also for teaching and conducting research in the fields of Jewish folklore and liturgy.

Although Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) did not begin playing the piano until he was nine years old, he had already enrolled at the conservatoire in Saint Petersburg (then called Petrograd) by age 13 because of his exceptional talent. He began in the piano department, but after four years he started studying composition in parallel. He achieved impressive results in both fields. In 1926, the Leningrad Philharmonic (Saint Petersburg had been renamed yet again) premiered his First Symphony in F minor, Op. 10, which he had composed as his conservatoire graduation project. The premiere caused a sensation—the public and critics were amazed by the maturity of the 20-year-old composer, who drew international attention as well. He also enjoyed success as a performer, even earning an honourable mention at age 21 at the Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw.

Shortly after graduating from the conservatoire, Shostakovich met Ivan Sollertinsky (1902–1944), the director of programming of the Leningrad Philharmonic, a critic, and a polymath. This extraordinary, passionate expert on European music and especially on Gustav Mahler systematically introduced the young composer to the atmosphere of modern culture and philosophy. When Sollertinsky died suddenly, Shostakovich was devastated: “I had lost my closest friend. I am indebted to him for all of my development as a man and as an artist.” At the time, Shostakovich was at work on a new chamber work, the Piano Trio in E minor, Op. 67, which he dedicated to Sollertinsky’s memory. The first movement was written in the winter of 1943. The hushed, lonely-sounding cello harmonics at the beginning leave no doubt that the composer was reflecting on the horrors of war. Through the sophisticated use of simple resources, he is able to give masterful expression to feelings that would be difficult to capture in words. The second movement, a scherzo (a joke!) with refined black humour, is simultaneously a reference to Sollertinsky, whose wit and sense of perspective revealed to Shostakovich a possible path for his own artistic expression. The third movement, an emotional passacaglia, is the emotional heart of the composition, then in the finale we are confronted with Jewish folk dancing in the horrifying context of death. This was the composer’s reaction to reports about prisoners being forced by SS guards in Treblinka and Majdanek to dig their own graves and to dance in them. Rather than on Jewish folk music, his focus was on the Jewish ethos that stands up to death with ironic euphoria. In memoirs that could only be published after the composer’s death, Shostakovich wrote: “Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it, it’s multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears. This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be.” The trio was first performed on 14 November 1944 in Leningrad by the violinist Dmitri Tsyganov, the cellist Sergei Shirinsky, and the composer at the piano. The audience in the hall listened in total silence with absolute concentration; with the dying away of the last movement, which even caused physical distress for some listeners, there followed a long, thunderous ovation.

The very first graduate of the composition programme at the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire (1865) was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), the symbol of a new era in Russian music, when composers there were beginning to rely on systematic academic training. Not even acquiring perfect command of the disciplined formal approach of western Europe could stifle the emotional immediacy and individuality that remained fundamental to his musical style. For a long time, Tchaikovsky viewed the piano trio genre negatively. In a letter to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck dated October 1880, he wrote: “My ear cannot bear the combination of piano with violin or cello … listening to a trio is sheer torture for me.” Despite this, he admitted his admiration for “the ingenious artistry with which Beethoven, Schumann, and Mendelssohn overcome these difficulties”.

Just a year later, Tchaikovsky did, in fact, turn to the piano trio genre under the weight of a personal tragedy—the sudden death of Nikolai Rubinstein, a pianist, teacher, and great supporter of Tchaikovsky’s music. In January 1882, while staying in Rome, he composed his Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50 “À la mémoire d’un grand artiste”. The work was premiered on 11 March of that year at the Moscow Conservatoire, exactly a year after Rubinstein’s death, by Sergei Taneyev (piano), Jan Hřímalý (violin), and Wilhelm Fitzenhagen (cello). Tchaikovsky was involved with the premiere, but soon afterwards he revised the work, taking into consideration the comments of the performers, and the trio was then published in that revised form.

Instead of using the usual three- or four-movement structure, Tchaikovsky composed his trio in an entirely original two-movement form. He arrived at this less through any architectonic perspective than through emotional dramaturgy: the first movement with its elegiac character is an expression of sorrow, while the second, a theme with eleven variations and a coda, all serving as a vivid kaleidoscope of memories of Rubinstein. At the conclusion, the variations’ mosaic of images and characters plunges back into a funereal atmosphere. The coda then brings the whole work to a close with a clear message—not as a formal finale, but as a symbolic musical epitaph.