Thoughts on the Death of Rodion Shchedrin

Rodion Shchedrin (right) with his wife, prima ballerina assoluta Maya Plisetskaya (photograph provided by Si-Ziga, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, from Wikimedia Commons)

I just finished reading the obituary for composer Rodion Shchedrin, written by Johnathan Kandell for The New York Times. I know Shchedrin’s music best for his score for Alberto Alonso’s one-act ballet “Carmen Suite,” created for Maya Plisetskaya, prima ballerina assoluta of the Bolshoi Ballet. According to my archives, the New Century Chamber Orchestra performed this suite twice, the most recent having taken place in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in September of 2014. Unless I am mistaken, I was able to see this ballet performed by American Ballet Theatre back when I was working on the East Coast a few decades ago.

It would be fair to say that what I remember most about this score is the abundance of Shchedrin’s gestures that poke fun at the music for Georges Bizet’s Carmen. The first example that comes to mind is how he rearranged the entrance of the toreadors for a xylophone solo. (Any time I played my recording for friends, that episode evoked the most raucous response!)

I subsequently had a second encounter with that sense of humor, this time a bit more explicitly. This was back in 2019, when I wrote about the Profil release of thirteen CDs entitled Kyrill Kondrashin Edition: 1937–1963. This included Shchedrin’s first concerto for orchestra, given the title “Naughty Limericks.” Mind you, the music did not do a particularly good job of reflecting the “scan” of a limerick; but the overall rhetoric was unabashedly naughty. This was composed in 1963, a decidedly “safe distance” from any risk of provoking the legacy of Joseph Stalin!

Shchedrin’s sense of humor would surface about three decades later with the publication of “3 Merry Pieces” for piano trio. I first encountered this music on the debut album by the AdAstra Piano Trio, released through the Polish label CD ACCORD. I had little to say about this music at that time, but it was in good company rubbing shoulders with another raucous composition, the three-movement “Café Music” by Paul Schoenfield, which I have previously associated with performance by a band of Muppets!

With all that context, it would be fair to say that Shchedrin never seemed to be shy about exercising his sense of humor, no matter who happened to be calling the shots from the Kremlin!