Opening concert vielklang 2025

Dmitry Shostakovich

was born in St. Petersburg in 1906 and came into contact with Russian and German music at an early age. At the age of 6, his mother gave him piano lessons, and at 13 he began studying music (piano and composition) at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He completed his studies in 1925 with the composition of his First Symphony, which soon went around the world.
He initially made a living as a cinema pianist, but completed his first opera “The Nose” in 1928, whose grotesques reflect the modernist currents of the first post-revolutionary years of the Soviet Union. His second opera “Lady Macbeth” followed in 1934 and was performed more than a hundred times.
In 1936, an article inspired by Stalin appeared in “Pravda” with the title “Chaos instead of music”, which not only caused Shostakovich’s operas to disappear from the stage, but also put his own life in danger. In 1948, another blow was dealt by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was directed not only against him but also against other composers. Shostakovich went into internal emigration and read out prefabricated statements at foreign congresses to which the Soviet Union’s most famous composer was sent, so that he was thought to be loyal to the regime. He confided what was really going on inside him in his compositions, some of which could only be performed after Stalin’s death in 1953.
In his later years, there was less pressure – although Shostakovich had to join the CPSU because he had been elected chairman of the Soviet Composers’ Union. The last years of his life were marked by serious illness. Shostakovich died in Moscow in 1975, highly esteemed abroad but hardly mentioned in Russia.

Five pieces for two violins and piano
in an arrangement for violin, violoncello and piano

 

Mieczyslav Weinberg
Solo Sonata for Violoncello op. 72

Weinberg was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1919. His parents worked in the Yiddish Theater in Warsaw, so he was surrounded by music from an early age, taught himself to play the piano and was able to stand in for his father as conductor at the Jewish Theater in Warsaw at a very young age. He also began composing during this time.
At the age of 12, he began studying piano at the Warsaw Conservatory, but was actually more interested in composing. When the German Wehrmacht invaded Warsaw in 1939, he fled to the Soviet Union with his sister. He studied composition in Minsk.
Cultural policy in Russia changed after the war. As a Jew, Weinberg suffered ever greater repression, although his music was highly regarded by his colleagues. He was imprisoned in 1953 and was only released thanks to Shostakovich’s insistent intercession. He initially worked on film and drama music, but then turned to chamber music in the 1960s and experienced great recognition when outstanding performers such as the Borodin Quartet and Mstislav Rostropovich played his works. His Cello Sonata op. 72 was composed in 1960. The setting of “Winnie the Pooh” made him instantly famous.
In the 1980s, public taste changed, and a chronic illness limited Weinberg’s creative power, so that his music was no longer in great demand in Russia, but certainly in Western countries from the 1990s onwards.
Weinberg died in Moscow in 1996.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Much ado about nothing (Viel Lärm um nichts)

Korngold was born in Brno in 1897. In 1901, the family moved to Vienna, where Erich was soon regarded as a musical prodigy and was even described as a “little Mozart” by music critic Eduard Hanslick. In 1926, he was awarded the City of Vienna Art Prize. After working with Max Reinhardt in Hollywood from 1934 – initially on the arrangement of music by Felix Mendelssohn as film music for Reinhardt’s film version of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – Korngold emigrated permanently with his family to the USA in 1938, where he wrote a total of 19 film scores.
Korngold died in Los Angeles in 1957.
The incidental music for “Much Ado About Nothing” was intended for a symphony orchestra: however, as this was not feasible due to the war, an arrangement for violin and piano was created. The four movements are entitled “In the Bridal Chamber”: changing feelings immediately before the wedding – “Dogberry and Verges”: march of the birds keeping watch – “Garden Scene”: a girl falls in love with a nobleman – “Mummers’ Dance”: merry musicians play for the dance.

Dmitry Shostakovich
Cello Sonata in D minor (op. 40)

In its lyricism and melody, the cello sonata has conservative, late Romantic traits and is considered Shostakovich’s first important chamber music work. It was composed in 1934 and dedicated to his cellist friend Wiktor Kubazki. The premiere on December 25, 1935 in Leningrad by the dedicatee Kubazki and Shostakovich at the piano was a great success.
The sonata was soon heard in the world’s major concert halls. Gregor Piatigorsky and Pierre Fournier in particular championed it. Today it is firmly established in the cello repertoire.

Erwin Schulhoff
Duo for violin and violoncello

Born in Prague in 1894, Schulhoff was one of the most enigmatic figures at the dawn of modernism in the 1920s. As a Bohemian Jew, he first studied with Jindrich Kaan in his home town of Prague on the advice of Antonín Dvořák, and later also with Claude Debussy and Max Reger. He fought in Italy during the First World War and then went to Dresden, where he launched a concert series with works from the Viennese School. His own compositions were played at the most important festivals of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Salzburg, Geneva, Venice and Donaueschingen, with chamber music playing a central role. Schulhoff died in 1942 at Wülzburg near Weißenburg in Bavaria, where Czech and Polish Jews were interned.
Schulhoff is a representative of the “lost generation” of early modern composers, which also included Ernest Bloch, Erich Korngold and Rudi Stephan. They fell victim to the terror of the Nazi regime, which also posthumously ensured that the reputation of their works could not spread appropriately. As an active communist, Soviet citizen and Jew, Schulhoff was one of the first to be interned by the Germans after the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Gidon Kremer was particularly active in rediscovering his oeuvre.
Schulhoff composed the Duo for violin and cello in 1926. Of the four movements, the first and last are subtly related to each other: in the introductory Moderato, the violin’s opening theme returns rondo-like; it is taken up in the finale and changed in an original way: it is no longer in quintuplet time (as in the first movement), but in quadruplet time with slight melodic changes.

Dmitry Shostakovich
Piano Trio No.1 in C major (op. 8)

Shostakovich wrote this trio in 1922 at the age of seventeen while studying in St. Petersburg. It was premiered in Moscow in 1925.
The one-movement piece varies a chromatically descending three-note motif intoned at the beginning with admirable ingenuity and in constantly changing tempo episodes. An indulgent melody reminiscent of Tchaikovsky is introduced as the second theme.

 

C: Harenberg / Kulturführer – Kammermusik, Villa Musica / Rheinland-Pfalz – Kammermusikführer, Wikipedia, Hugo Riemanns Musiklexikon