Shostakovich's Circle [Import]

German (or Hermann) Galynin (also spelled Galinin; accent on the second syllable) had the misfortune to live under the dark shadow of Stalin's suffocating cultural policies, and he has remained almost totally unknown outside of Russia. Yuli Turovsky, acting on memories of having performed some of Galynin's music before emigrating from Moscow in 1976, and with the aid of colleagues still living there, has undertaken to bring his music to the west. The Third Quartet was written in 1946, three years after the Eighth Symphony, one of Shostakovich's trilogy of "War" symphonies (Nos. 7, 8 and 9). The Third Quartet bears striking resemblances to this symphony. Both works are in five movements, both are artistic statements born of tragedy and suffering, and while the Quartet, at about 35 minutes is not as long as the sixty-minute symphony, each is a work of grand scale and proportion. Furthermore, each contains a brutal, march-like second movement, a third movement depicting the destructive power of war, and a fourth in the form of a passacaglia, "a requiem in [its] depth of inner sorrow" in the words of Yoritoyo Inouye. The quartet's first movement opens with a seemingly light-hearted theme set to the polka rhythm, but there is an almost relentless undercurrent of mordant wit and grotesquerie throughout. This is not happy music. The finale offers a note of tentative hope, of smiling through the tears. The seventeen-minute concerto is in a single movement consisting of several linked episodes. A rhythmic figure (short-long, short-long) announced by the soloist and repeated by strings in the opening bars (Lento assai) serves as the pervasive unifying motif of the concerto. A sudden change of pace (Allegro moderato) brings a headlong rush of sixteenth notes, with piano and strings passing musical material playfully back and forth. Another sudden change of tempo brings the Andante cantabile, which begins dolce and rises to a peak of intensity before the arrival of the passage marked "Cadenza," surely one of the strangest in the repertory inasmuch as it offers no opportunities whatsoever for displays of temperament or virtuosity. Next comes a Largo interlude. This slowly gains momentum until the music is essentially moving along in a healthy allegro tempo. The remainder of the concerto consists of an almost obsessive development of the short-long rhythmic motif that introduced the work, culminating in a grandiose peroration in C major.

German (or Hermann) Galynin (also spelled Galinin; accent on the second syllable) had the misfortune to live under the dark shadow of Stalin's suffocating cultural policies, and he has remained almost totally unknown outside of Russia. Yuli Turovsky, acting on memories of having performed some of Galynin's music before emigrating from Moscow in 1976, and with the aid of colleagues still living there, has undertaken to bring his music to the west. The Third Quartet was written in 1946, three years after the Eighth Symphony, one of Shostakovich's trilogy of "War" symphonies (Nos. 7, 8 and 9). The Third Quartet bears striking resemblances to this symphony. Both works are in five movements, both are artistic statements born of tragedy and suffering, and while the Quartet, at about 35 minutes is not as long as the sixty-minute symphony, each is a work of grand scale and proportion. Furthermore, each contains a brutal, march-like second movement, a third movement depicting the destructive power of war, and a fourth in the form of a passacaglia, "a requiem in [its] depth of inner sorrow" in the words of Yoritoyo Inouye. The quartet's first movement opens with a seemingly light-hearted theme set to the polka rhythm, but there is an almost relentless undercurrent of mordant wit and grotesquerie throughout. This is not happy music. The finale offers a note of tentative hope, of smiling through the tears. The seventeen-minute concerto is in a single movement consisting of several linked episodes. A rhythmic figure (short-long, short-long) announced by the soloist and repeated by strings in the opening bars (Lento assai) serves as the pervasive unifying motif of the concerto. A sudden change of pace (Allegro moderato) brings a headlong rush of sixteenth notes, with piano and strings passing musical material playfully back and forth. Another sudden change of tempo brings the Andante cantabile, which begins dolce and rises to a peak of intensity before the arrival of the passage marked "Cadenza," surely one of the strangest in the repertory inasmuch as it offers no opportunities whatsoever for displays of temperament or virtuosity. Next comes a Largo interlude. This slowly gains momentum until the music is essentially moving along in a healthy allegro tempo. The remainder of the concerto consists of an almost obsessive development of the short-long rhythmic motif that introduced the work, culminating in a grandiose peroration in C major.