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Shostakovich: String Quartet No 15; Gubaidulina: Rejoice / Kremer, Phillips, Ma, Kashkashian

Release Date: 10/14/2014
Label: Sony Catalog #: 55634
Composer:  Dmitri Shostakovich ,  Sofia Gubaidulina Performer:  Yo-Yo Ma ,  Gidon Kremer ,  Kim Kashkashian ,  Daniel Phillips Number of Discs: 1
Recorded in: Stereo

Of the several works by Sofia Gubaidulina released on disc in the past year, I was most affected by the problematically entitled Rejoice!—joined on disc with an equally taut rendering of Shostakovich's Ode to Desolation.

-- Edward Strickland, FANFARE [Want List, 1990]


The background to Sofia Gubaidulina's Rejoice!...is in the spiritual lessons of Grigory Skovoroda, an eighteenth-century Ukrainian philosopher and religious thinker. These supply the sub-titles (rather Messiaen-like in resonance) of each of the five movements. The composer herself cautions, "It should not be assumed that I wanted to illustrate the theme of joy in my music... the religious theme is experienced Read more metaphorically." It is meant to be experienced musically as well, through the juxtaposition of "normal" sounds and harmonics: "The possibility for string instruments to derive pitches of various heights at one and the same place on the string can be experienced in music as the transition to another plane of existence. And that is joy"... Rejoice! is certainly not short of atmospheric ideas. The opening violin meditation gently evokes a stillness in the mind...

Kremer and Ma perform with mastery and dedication... Shostakovich's last quartet is a bold and thought-provoking coupling... Despair! might be an appropriate sub-title were that the state of mind not so obvious anyway. The players have to somehow to call up the blackest images and then suppress them, they have to play as though with their thoughts elsewhere and yet with no loss of control, to enter regions where time is frozen. In all this Kremer and his colleagues succeed admirably, although perhaps because this is a public performance they make slight concession to conventional expressiveness which they might not allow if playing for themselves – nuances creep into the blank opening "Elegy" and in the excruciating "Serenade" the second violin cannot resist adding a vibrato his partners ruthlessly avoid. On the whole though, the music can take the intensity these fine musicians bring to it and the overall impression is moving and convincing.

-- Gramophone Read less