St Petersburg, Concert Hall

Moscow Soloists Chamber Orchestra


The programme includes works by Shostakovich, Mozart,  Bruch and Tchaikovsky

The programme includes:
Dmitry Shostakovich. Chamber Symphony in C Minor
(arrangement of Quartet No 8 for Chamber Orchestra by Rudolf Barshai)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Piano Concerto No 9 in E Flat Major
Soloist: Ksenia Bashmet

Max Bruch. Romance for Viola and Orchestra
Soloist: Yuri Bashmet

Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Serenade for Strings

Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet enjoys a popularity rare for a work that is so academic in terms of genre. The reason is the programme, which Shostakovich exhaustively expounded in a letter to Isaak Glikman, telling his friend of his arrival in July 1960 at a resort in Saxon Switzerland near Dresden: “I watched materials of the film Five Days, Five Nights directed by Lev Arnshtam. I settled in very well to create the right artistic surroundings. The artistic conditions justified themselves: I composed my Eighth Quartet there. However much I tried to execute my tasks in rough for the cinematic film, I have as yet been unable to do so. And instead of that I wrote an ideologically empty quartet that no-one needed. I considered that if I ever die then it is extremely unlikely anyone would write a work dedicated to my memory. And so I decided to write one myself.”
Shostakovich wrote this musical “auto-epitaph” literally a few days after he had been unable to avoid joining the CPSU (although he had refused to join the party several times, it having destroyed the lives of so many people). In the music, the programme is expressed just as clearly. The quartet opens with a monogram there (D-Es-C-H), which runs through all five parts, in places even becoming importunate. The composer’s self-portrait is completed using themes from his First, Eighth and Tenth Symphonies, the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, his Piano Trio and Cello Concerto. The themes come with “hints” of Wagner’s Trauermarsch and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony as well as the revolutionary song Tormented by Grievous Bondage. Officially, the quartet is dedicated to the memory of victims of fascism and war. There are different versions of the Eighth Quartet for various performing ensembles. Rudolf Barshai’s orchestration was given the title Chamber Symphony.
Anna Bulycheva

Concerto No 9 KV 271 in E Flat Major was composed by Mozart in his home city of Salzburg in January 1777. It forms part of the so-called “Salzburg Concerti” (KV 175 – 365). At the time, keyboard music was incredibly popular in fashionable households, and the twenty-year-old Mozart had many pupils for whom he indeed wrote various keyboard works. For example, the Concerto for Three Pianos in F Major, KV 242, which was composed one year earlier, was intended for the Countess Lodron and her two daughters Aloisia and Josepha. The Ninth Concerto was composed for the virtuoso French pianist Mlle Jeunehomme. It is noteworthy that Mozart, despite the fact that he composed his concerto for the renowned performer, almost entirely rejected any virtuoso elements that set his earlier keyboard works apart. The cycle consists of three movements (Allegro-Andantino-Rondeau (Presto)) and it stands alone thanks to its thematic richness, typical of the young Mozart.
Pavel Velikanov

Max Bruch (1838-1920) was one of the most important composers of the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The most productive period of his career was between the 1880s and the 1910s, a time when he wrote almost all of his major works – operas, symphonies and concerti. During Bruch’s lifetime his large-scale choral works Odysseus (1872) and Das Feuerkreuz (1899) were particularly popular. With time, however, the public’s tastes changed. They began to focus principally on Max Bruch’s symphonic works: his violin concerti (particularly the First, composed in 1868 and which is a core part of the violin repertoire), the Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra, the Romance for Viola and Orchestra, Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra and his three symphonies. The Romance for Viola and Orchestra has been dazzlingly performed by Yuri Bashmet on numerous occasions, while Kurt Masur has recorded all three of the composer’s symphonies.
Pavel Velikanov

Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C Major (1880) is one of the composer’s most famous works. When he composed it, Tchaikovsky was making reference both to examples of 18th century music (he himself wrote that “In the first section I have paid my tributes to Mozart; it is a deliberate imitation of his style, and I would be happy if people were to say I was not too distant from the image I took.”) and to the discoveries of his own contemporaries, amongst whom the Hungarian composer Volkmann was particularly close to him.
The typical features of instrumental composition of the early 18th century and Mozart’s era are doubtless present in the first section. The second section – a waltz – is a traditional feature of a serenade as a reference to an everyday genre (in the 18th century this was the minuet). The Élégie (third section) has a definite vocal musical nature: the accompanying voices may be interpreted as a “chorus”, while the main melody is, of course, a romance; it is a brilliant “song without words” alongside other pieces written by Tchaikovsky. We meet yet another everyday kind of music in the finale, the theme of which is the Russian dance song Under the Apple Tree. This undeniable masterpiece by the great composer, albeit modest in terms of size, blends together the traditions of two centuries of Russian and European music.
Nadezhda Kulygina

Age category 6+

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