Thanks to Alex Ross’ daily maintenance of the COVID-19 live streams post on his The Rest Is Noise blog, I was able to enjoy a thoroughly riveting account of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 110 (eighth) string quartet in C minor by the Boston Artists Ensemble (BAE). The Web page on which the video recording of this performance has been embedded does not provide much by way of background material about either the music or the musicians, but there is no questioning the intense expressiveness of the performance. (There is a hyperlink to a PDF file of program notes, but it is a rather modest affair for music so rich in content.) The only downside is that Ross claims the Web page will be active for only 24 hours, but he failed to mention when the clock started ticking! (As it write this, it has been about two hours since I saw his post.)
It is important to observe that the entire video was made with a single camera. Someone (not cited) found the best way to frame the entire quartet of players, after which it was just a matter of turning the camera on and off at the right times. Personally, I do not think there is a good way to improve on such a straightforward approach. When one tries to sort Shostakovich’s score into foreground and background, one quickly realizes that this is a futile task. This is very much an intimate conversation among equals in which very little of the content ever recedes into any sort of background. As at a concert performance, every listener/viewer should have the liberty of choosing where to direct his/her attention at any time; and the video that is being streamed never infringes on that liberty.
Where content is concerned, I believe that Opus 110 is the one from the entire collection of fifteen quartets that I have heard in performance most often. It was composed over the course of only three days, July 12–14, 1960. Shostakovich was in Dresden at the time, working on music for a film about the bombing of Dresden during World War II, produced jointly by Soviet and East German filmmakers. That war had taken a heavy toll on Shostakovich’s psyche, and that impact was evident from the symphonies he composed during the siege of Leningrad, where Shostakovich was living, as well as his Opus 67 (second) piano trio in E minor.
The film project thus confronted him with dealing with many horrifying ghosts from the past, and the Opus 110 quartet may have been written to prepare him for that confrontation. There is certainly no shortage of “autobiographical” content in his thematic material, which includes his own “signature,” the four-note DSCH motif, and many other references to past work, including the Opus 67.
The four BAE members giving the performance on this video recording are Bayla Keyes and Daniel Chong on violin, Jessica Bodner on viola, and Jonathan Miller on cello. All four of them could not have done a better job in presenting Shostakovich’s score as that intimate conversation among equals. Even those not familiar with the score itself should have no trouble following the rhetorical journey that the composer plotted for this composition. The fact that three of the five movements (first, fourth, and fifth) are in Largo tempo does not bog down the quartet’s account of an expressive journey from beginning to end. The darkness of both present circumstances in Dresden and harrowing recollections of the past almost drove Shostakovich to suicide. However, it may be that channeling his despair into this music served to reinforce his motivation to live.
It is worth noting in conclusion that there is no evidence of any audience noise on this recording. One sees members of the audience sitting attentively. However, there is no sign of any nervous shuffling or the fatigue of boredom. The BAE players knew how to hold the attention of their audience. My guess is that anyone joining that audience through cyberspace will be equally riveted to every gesture by every member of the quartet.
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