Unfinished Operas

*  Fleishman: Rothschild's Violin
*  Shostakovich: The Gamblers

Jacek Janiszewski (Ivanov, bass),
Elena Gabouri (Marfa, mezzo),
Andris Lapins (Rothschild, tenor);
Michal Lehotsky (Ikharyov, tenor),
Peter Danailov (Uteshitelny, baritone),
Roman Astakhov (Shvoknev, tenor);
Royal Liverpool  Philharmonic Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko
Avie AV2121 Total time: 37:07 + 45:37 (2 CDs)

Summary for the Busy Executive: Two fascinating morsels.

Veniamin Fleishman (1913-1941), a Soviet Jew, died at twenty-eight as a
soldier during World War II.  He left only this score, a one-act opera
somewhat incomplete.  His composition professor, Dmitri Shostakovich,
completed the work in 1943, the only time Shostakovich performed such
a service.

Based on a short story by Chekhov, Rothschild's Violin concerns a
coffin-maker and violinist in the town orchestra, "Bronza" Ivanov.
He gets mad at the conductor and storms out of rehearsal, vowing never
to return.  When he gets back home to his dying wife, he realizes that
he will have to make an expensive coffin for her, and the business is
failing.  Rothschild, a flutist in the orchestra, drops by to persuade
him to return and gets thrown out for his pains.  The coffin-maker then
ruminates on his life and realizes that his only pleasure had been playing
violin in the orchestra.  Rothschild returns to try to persuade the man
to return, and the coffin-maker hands him his violin.  Chekhov goes on
to end the story in the following way.  From the day Rothschild received
the instrument, he gave up the flute entirely.  When he played what
Ivanov played, people wept, enjoyed the weeping, and hired him to play
it again.

To me one of the saddest ever written, the story reminds me of Job's
laments without the final transcendence.  Yet it has its subtle comic
moments.  After all, nothing -- not even taxes -- is as certain as death,
and yet the only coffin-maker in town can't make a go of things, despite
the inevitable pool of clients.

The music, as you might expect, displays elements of Shostakovich's
style, but with an emphasis on klezmer, years before Shostakovich
himself became interested in Russian Jewish musical folklore.  In that
sense, as the liner notes point out, the pupil likely influenced the
teacher.  Fleishman also matches, I think, Shostakovich's psychological
acuity, though he falls short of the other's musical incisiveness and
the libretto loses some of Chekhov's finest moments in the interests
of dramatic concision.  The finest measures of the piece occur at the
end, when Shostakovich alone brings the little opera to a close with a
four-to-six-minute instrumental.  On the other hand, he dilutes the drama
by tacking on this brilliant set piece, not particularly germane either
to the opera or to the original short story.

Shostakovich's Gamblers, based on the Gogol play, stands as a testimony
to the composer's tough-mindedness.  The hostility to his first opera,
The Nose, and the fiasco over Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District might
have made any composer gun-shy about undertaking another opera, but
Shostakovich loved the Gogol and determined to set every word of the
play as the author had written it.  After setting about a seventh of the
play, he wound up with over three-quarters of an hour and realized that
the opera would run way too long.  Rather than fail to carry through his
original plan, he abandoned the opera for good.

He left us with an absorbing fragment of cheaters cheating cheaters.
The music is of consistently high quality and inspiration.  The forty-five
minutes flies by.  Such an opera four times the length of this fragment
wouldn't tax anybody.  You can tell Shostakovich is a born dramatist and
storyteller, because this bit leaves you hungry for more.

The performances are decent.  The singers, all Russian, tend to either
woof or bleat, although mezzo Elena Gabouri and baritone Peter Danailov
stand out as notable exceptions.  Nevertheless, I greatly prefer this
to Italianate singers -- a matter of dramatic realism (versus a near-abstract
notion of Beauty) far more suitable to these two stories.  The orchestra
plays crisp and clear.

Steve Schwartz

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