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Not Dark Yet #289: All part of my Autumn Armagnac

5/11/2018

4 Comments

 
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I’m writing this at 4pm on Sunday afternoon, and it’s almost dark. The clocks went back last weekend, ensuring that the first pitch of the final game of the World Series was at midnight our time. And as the euphoria of that victory fades, the prospect of months of short days – “It gets later earlier here” – is depressing. No baseball, no cricket, no Dylan visit to the UK. “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.”
 
Keats is never far from my thoughts, but appeared unprompted and powerfully on Friday evening. Because Autumn’s music in Leamington Spa was provided by the Fitzwilliam Quartet and, in the Mozart Quintet, Sophie Renshaw as second viola.
 
The programme was changed at the last minute, the death of first violin Lucy Russell’s father meaning that there was insufficient time for rehearsals of the Bruckner Quintet. So I still haven’t seen or heard this (apparently) complex piece.
 
But what a treat we had instead. The Fitzbillies dug into a half-century of repertoire to present us with one of the most startling quartets of our time.
 
Reader, we were given Shostakovich’s Opus 138, the Quartet #13 in B flat minor.
 
The Fitzbilly and Shostakovich have form. The European première of the Opus 138 was given by them. The second ever performance, a few days later, was also given by them, and this time with Shostakovich himself in the audience. It was the beginning of what Shostakovich called a “musical friendship”, and Benjamin Britten reported that Shostakovich had told him that the Fitzwilliam was his “preferred performers of my quartets”.
 
I am indebted to the excellent programme notes of Richard Phillips MBE for this stuff; I didn’t know before the Friday interval.
 
What I did know was that Shostakovich’s 13th quartet is a segue from the second movement of the 12th, a performance of which – by the Kodaly – was the last time I heard a Shostakovich played in the Regency grandeur of the Leamington Pump Rooms. In this sense, the experience was akin to hearing the Dead playing a single gig on several successive nights up the East Coast in the ‘70s. But even the Dead never got close to the ferocious atonal screaming of the central section of this dark and scary quartet. Nor did the Dead ever create anything so soulful as those final bars from the viola, climbing higher and higher into silence.
 
It’s less than 20 minutes long. But, played by this quartet, it’s better than any Dark Star > St. Stephen > The Eleven you ever heard.
 
Yes, yes, yes. It’s all part of my autumn almanac.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: This morning it was the Emerson and the Kodaly versions of #13. This afternoon, I’m returning to More Blood, More Tracks. One could argue that they are as one in their inspiration and theme. But I won't.
 
4 Comments
(Notthat) Bob
5/11/2018 10:45:33

Re the parallels between Dead, Dylan and Dmitri. Think you've stretched the cord/chord to breaking point this time. Even in the late sixties feedback stuff, the Dead were not going for overt discordance. And if the central section of the Shostakovich is in any sense 'trippy', it's a bad trip!

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Joe
5/11/2018 10:54:18

Phil might have gone for atonal stuff. Jerry loved melody.

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Ludwig Van
5/11/2018 11:34:01

Don't know about your parallels, but the obvious link is to Beethoven's late quartets. Shostakovich had already had one heart attack and was soon to have another. He was to spend many months in hospital for chemo and radio therapy for liver problems and these intimations of mortality prompt the new kind of music which he was trying to create.

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Allan
6/11/2018 10:11:45

I think this is absolutely right. Shostakovich and Beethoven very closely linked. But if you want a Dylan parallel, it is not Blood on the Tracks, but Time out of mind, and specifically Not Dark Yet (surely, Max!). The Dead? How about So many Roads (to ease my soul) or Days Between.

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    Max Smith

    European writer, radical, restaurateur and Red Sox fan. 70-something husband, father, step-father, grandfather and son. Resident in Warwick, England.

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