Another review of last week’s Shostakovich at Music@Menlo.
“Jumping past the entire Stalinist era, the concert then arrived at Shostakovich’s Seven Romances on Poems of Aleksandr Blok, Op. 127. By this time (1967), Shostakovich was facing death and writing bleak, hollow music in disregard of any political context. The voice is accompanied by a piano trio, but only in the last song do the instruments all play at once. Even then they hardly form an ensemble, so thin and widely separated is the scoring. The accompaniment in the earlier songs varies from counter-melodies woven by Kim or Finckel unaccompanied to plain but deep chords which Solzhenitsyn ruthlessly hammered out on the piano.”