“About Shostakovich”
Concert with Violin, Cello, Piano & Reading
Dialogue between Dmitri Shostakovich and his conscience.
Shostakovich sits in front of a chessboard, lost in thought and absents. A stranger appears and asks him abruptly: “Would you like a game?” During this chess game, the stranger starts a conversation that becomes increasingly mysterious.
Who is this person? Where does he come from? How does he know all the intimate details of Shostakovich’s life? With his ever more relentless questions, he reminds Shostakovich more and more of his former love, his musical conscience, his student, the composer Galina Ivanovna Ustvolskaya. Has she put the stranger on him? Late retaliation?Shostakovich is spellbound. He is unable to end the conversation because the stranger’s questions are those that have preoccupied him for years and that Galina Ivanovna asked him: How would his life have been if he had distanced himself from the party in his youth? Was his party membership really unforgivable? Had he lost himself as a composer? Was he really a state artist loyal to the regime and adapted? Shostakovich begins to justify himself.
But suddenly he realizes that he is alone. Where did the stranger go? All the chess pieces lie in front of Shostakovich as if no one had ever sat at his table. The stranger is as if in thin air and with him his chair. Did Shostakovich talk to himself in the end? With his own conscience? And did he checkmate himself?
Key data
Artists:
Tetiana Lutsyk o.a., Violin
Friedrich Kleinhapl, Cello
Andreas Woyke, Piano
Heidrun Maya Hagn, Text & lighting director
Changing reciters. Among others with Johannes Silberschneider and Wolfram Berger.
Duration: 90 Minutes
Program: Cello sonatas, piano trios and jazz and ballet suites arranged for cello and piano by Dmitri Shostakovich
Samples
Artists: Friedrich Kleinhapl, Cello
Andreas Woyke, Piano
Composer: Dmitri Shostakovich