Claudio Abbado has conducted his last perfromance with the Berlin
Philharmonic at its home venue. He is now taking the orchestra on a brief
tour be fore retiring as it pricipal conductor and artistic director. His
last performance in Berlin featured some offbeat Shostakovich film music.
Here is the section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine that reported on this
April 29:
"...His friendship with Nono brought him into contact with the
Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, who directed his London
production of "Boris Godunov." It was then that the conductor came
across Shostakovich as a composer of film music, believing the most
expressive of all his works to be the very last piece he wrote --
namely the film music for Grigori Kosinzew's movie adaptation of
"King Lear."
"Abbado's farewell concert therefore included an extraordinary double
revelation of both film and music. It was also a glimpse into the
murky depths of history, shot through with the interminable, grinding
death marches that since Mahler and Alban Berg have become a topos
of 20th century music especially in Shostakovich's world. While
Verdi was constantly dreaming of an operatic version of "King Lear,"
it was not until Aribert Reimann that such a work was actually written.
Shostakovich, meanwhile, was commissioned not with an opera, but
rather with the incidental music to Kosinzew's 1941 Leningrad production
of the play. Even then, he is alleged to have said that "it is not
for the composer to be a musical illustrator" -- a principal he
followed in 1971 with his music for Kosinzew's epic black-and-white
movie. That the music preserves its parasymphonic autonomy is also
what makes it so sublime: Not only did one see one of the most
momentous works in the history of Russian cinema, but one heard
authentic Shostakovich, too.
"To have shown Kosinzew's 140-minute film in its entirety would
not have worked, especially as the musical underpinning is only
intermittent. Instead, Abbado and Klaus-Peter Gross selected an
important sequence that would also enable the audience to hear the
beauty of Boris Pasternak's Russian rendering of Shakespeare's
original. The sound was then turned down and the tonal urgency of
Shostakovich's score was heard emanating from the darkness. Abbado
and Gross even raided the 1941 score, extracting from it the two
Cordelia songs and eight Fool's songs -- an important decision in
terms of the dramaturgy, given that Kosinzew treats Lear and the Fool
as an ego-alter-ego duo and does not deny Lear certain comical traits
in his madness. "The projection of the film sequences onto several
screens installed throughout the auditorium and the vocal parts sung
by Elena Zhidkova and Anatoli Kotscherga combined with the orchestra
and choir to produce a suggestive equivalent of the Soviet montage
aesthetic. Kosinzew's film with its at times archaic expressionism
and "kinetic" movements may be weighed down by ideology and its
insistence that the king's undoing is his betrayal of the ordinary
folk, but as a parable of despair, it remains a thrilling experience
right to the end, when the interminable death marches march on into
a bleak and empty no-man's land. And one must agree completely with
Abbado that Shostakovich's forceful, often dissonantly grating music
with its ostinati, its obsessive repetitions, screeching fanfares
and devastatingly apocalyptic marches is indeed among the greatest
things he ever wrote, especially as even its more heavy-handed moments
are instantly atomized by the negating power of the visual. "Below
the screens, the orchestra and choir performed in almost complete
darkness. Only at the very end did the lights go on again, just as
they would have in a movie theater. Abbado's glorious era could
hardly have had a less glamorous end."
Denis Fodor
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