Few pieces of music have the capacity to make me feel as lonely and disconsolate as the Master’s 2nd violin concerto. Written in 1967 when he was beset with chronic arthritis and heart disease, it is very much an old man’s work, shadowy and withdrawn, completely lacking in sweetness and melody, yet beautiful. Snatches of “classical” music and haunting memories of his own colossal earlier works make it very much a companion piece to his 15th symphony ( 1973), which has quotations of the “William Tell” overture and his own 4th symphony.
It is not a tragic work in the sense that the 1st violin concerto is: the swelling melodies, especially in the Passacaglia, are the work of an younger man, inspiring, even combative in its timeless, almost Brahmsian rhetoric. The 2nd concerto is, I think, a work beyond tragedy: not poker-faced but resigned, the work of a man who has known loss and death and heartbreak—and yet survived—at the end, Shostakovich is neither sad nor even happy; it is easy to call the work bitter or sarcastic, but it is as if the old shrunken face of the artist, lined by years of worry and illness, were suddenly twitching, half smile, half grimace.
Shostakovich Violin Concerto no 2-1st movement, Shostakovich-Violin Concerto no 2-3rd movement
Shostakovich Violin Concerto no 2-1st movement, Shostakovich-Violin Concerto no 2-3rd movement
Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody
ReplyDeleteI find one of them beautifully melancholic -- can sadness be enjoyable ?
Listening to the Rhapsody one would have to think so.