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What Makes Russian Music Russian?

About the Sonatas
by David Finckel and Wu Han

 

 

  David Finckel and Wu Han

David Finckel and Wu Han

Musician Web site
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When listening to Russian music you get the feeling that the composer is telling you a story, not just to convey information but to unburden themselves, and to describe and chronicle the human condition as it existed at the time.

 

Russia's music is imbued not only with the country's great suffering, but also of the joys and hopes brought by rare moments of peace and prosperity. The program is a journey reaching backward, from the familiar, harsh realities of the Soviet Union to the age of a gilded Russian aristocracy and unrestrained creativity.

Spanning the first half of the 20th century, the three greatest Russian cello sonatas evoke the romanticism of tsarist Russia to the torturous climate in Soviet times under the Stalin regime. These works are musical stories, told by voices from within a vast land, which take the listener deep inside the Russian soul. From tragic to sarcastic, from mystical to picturesque to passionate, no other music so vividly describes a country, its people and its changing culture.

Russian music has a hypnotic effect - the listener is deliberately put under a spell and taken places - one senses this was the mission of the composer, the impetus for creation.

Listen to the music and one's soul can travel there, even if the body cannot. The music is an invitation to visit a special, incaccessible world: distant, closed, yet home to millions you will never meet.

This is music which grabs the heart of the listener at the deepest level.


Read Gerard McBurney's The Elusive Soul of Russian Music.

A Song of Joy and Sorrow

A Song of Joy and Sorrow
by Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov

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Joy & Sorrow

Listen to Rachmaninov's music and conversation about how it knits together expressions of joy and sorrow.
(RealAudio; How to Listen)

"There is an indispensable measure of suffering even in the happiness of the Russian people, for without it, its happiness is incomplete."   -Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Then a woman said, 'Speak to us of joy and sorrow.' And he answered, 'When you are joyous, look deep into your heart, and you shall find that it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful, look again into your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.'"   -Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

In Russian music - as in many areas of Russian art and society - the juxtaposition and mingling of joy and sorrow intensify the experience of each, reflecting a characteristic fervor in the Russian temperament. In the Andante movement of his Sonata for Cello and Piano in g minor (Op. 19), Sergei Rachmaniov achieves this through the close interplay of major and minor harmonies.

Read more about Rachmaninov.

  Above Eternal Peace

Above Eternal Peace
by Isaac Il'ich Levitan

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Time & Space

Listen to conversation about how space and time play a part in Russian music, followed by an evocative performance from a Prokofiev sonata.
(RealAudio; How to Listen)

Russia’s identification with epic artistic statements - from Tolstoy’s War and Peace to expansive operas such as Prince Igor - echoes the vastness of a geography that totals one-fifth of the earth’s land mass. Travel and its means have long been a part of the national consciousness. A sense of great distances, and the seemingly endless time it can take to pass through them, pervades many smaller works as well. In the first movement of Sergei Prokofiev’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in C major (Op. 119), the cello opens with a reverberant bass note over which the piano - starting "like a train that’s trying to take off," in Wu Han’s words - gradually unfolds its melody. Prokofiev creates a further sense of space with the piano by employing both the very top and the very bottom of the keyboard.

Read more about Prokofiev.

  Me and My Village

Me and My Village
by Marc Chagall

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Storytelling

Listento conversation about how Russian music can tell a story, then hear one of Rachmaninov's own musical accounts.
Listen to more discussion about Prokofiev's musical storytelling and its context. (RealAudio; How to Listen)

Closely related to Russians' far-reaching sense of time and sense are the abundant stories that animate and make sense of those worlds. A narrative impulse can be found in most forms of expression, whether verbal, visual, or musical. At the outset of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Sonata for Piano and Cello in g minor (Op. 19), the composer seems to be saying "Sit down, I have a long story to tell you." Composed in 1901 - toward the end of the Czarist period - the piano part is highly decorative and digressive, enriched by multiple ornamental notes that seem to stretch time, while the darkly melodic cello line speaks the same story in a simpler way. Wu Han notes that Dmitri Shostkovich tells the story again three decades later using cello and piano, and he, too, is compelled by a Russian sense of narrative. But by the 1930s, Russia’s world had turned upside down, and Shostakovich conveys his version through radically different means.

Read more about Rachmaninov.

Farnos the Red Nose

Farnos the Red Nose
by Jacques Callot

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Humor

Listen to the performers discuss how Prokofiev communicates humor in a sonata, then a movement of the sonata itself.
(RealAudio; How to Listen)

The familiar image of rosy-cheeked Russian jollity doesn’t conceal darker strains of humor - the sarcasm, satire, and absurdism rooted in sheer daily hardship and the inane whims of officialdom endured by the Russian people. In such a harshly repressive society, humor has long been one of the few acceptable outlets for criticism and political commentary. (The traditional role of the yurodivy, or "holy fool," has been afforded artists from around the 15th century on. Read more about the "holy fool" in Shostakovich: Breaking Down Silence.) In the mischievous second movement of Sergei Prokofiev’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in C major (Op. 119), composed in the reactionary aftermath of the world wars, the composer mimics human laughter and uses unexpected dissonance as a kind of jibe.

Read more about Prokofiev.

  The Sitting Demon

The Sitting Demon
by Mikhail Vrubel

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Wrapping It All Up

Listen to discussion about how Shostakovich's sonata integrates each of the above qualities in a sonata along with 3 of the sonata's movements.
(RealAudio; How to Listen)

Dmitiri Shostakovich’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in d minor (Op. 40) draws from each of the distinctively Russian qualities embodied in the Rachmaninov and Prokofiev sonatas. Its second movement (Allegro)-a "most hysterical joke" in Wu Han’s words - stretches both instruments to their limits and is punctuated with angry laughter. David Finckel remarks on the "driving sort of peasant, pagan energy" in the movement, deriving from Shostakovich’s mastery of rhythm and his flair for telling a story. "From his earliest conservatory days people looked up to him as knowing how to use rhythm to just grab the listener. It’s almost kind of like a rock and roll effect." The landscape drawn by the third movement (Largo) is far bleaker than Prokofiev’s but again reveals a Russian awareness of space. And where Rachmaninov juxtaposes major and minor harmonies to mix and sharpen joy and sorrow, Shostakovich uses a minor key to completely transform the mood of his fourth movement (Allegro). "It would be a happy tune if it were in a major key," Finckel notes, "but in the minor it becomes sarcastic, diabolic…black humor."

Read more about Shostakovich.
Further reading Shostokovich:Breaking Down Silence