Here's an excellent Shostakovich chamber program, combining music from different phases of the composer's career as well as introducing two fairly unusual works in combination with a great masterwork, the Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67. This work, written in 1944 as the tide had begun to turn against Hitler's armies in Russia, is perhaps the definitive musical response to the horrors of the Second World War. Its final movement, evoking klezmer music gradually overtaken by darkness, is almost unbearably moving. There ...
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Here's an excellent Shostakovich chamber program, combining music from different phases of the composer's career as well as introducing two fairly unusual works in combination with a great masterwork, the Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67. This work, written in 1944 as the tide had begun to turn against Hitler's armies in Russia, is perhaps the definitive musical response to the horrors of the Second World War. Its final movement, evoking klezmer music gradually overtaken by darkness, is almost unbearably moving. There are points on this recording where you feel it's very much British Shostakovich and could use a bit more emotional demonstrativeness, but the E minor trio benefits greatly from the grim precision imparted by the Florestan Trio. The major find here is the set of Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok, Op. 127, composed in 1967 for soprano and an ensemble of violin, cello, and piano, which all come together on only in the seventh song, "Music" (track 8). Both the vocal treatment and...
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