The Gamblers Shostakovich

Shostakovich completed his Viola Sonata in 1975, just a few weeks before he died, making it his last composition, his swan song. The piece was written for the violist of the Beethoven Quartet, Fyodor Druzhinin, who received the score three days before the composer’s death. In this large-scale, three-movement sonata, the composer looks back over his oeuvre and the vicissitudes of his life, quoting from his unfinished opera (The Gamblers), his symphonies, and his Suite in F sharp minor, while the composition’s long, slow final movement stands as a memorial to Beethoven. The critic of the daily paper Izvestia wrote that the piece is “like the catharsis in a tragedy; life, struggles, victory, purification through light, and stepping into immortality.” We hear this heart-rending work in a perceptive performance by regular partners: the Ukrainian violist Maxim Rysanov, and the Armenian pianist Marianna Shirinyan.

This disc brings together a selection of songs by the five members of the Mighty Handful, and serves as a useful and economical introduction to their Read more The Miserly Knight, Alexander Serov’s Judith (both on Harmonia Mundi), and Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery (BMG). He also appears in recordings of Rimsky-Korsakov’s May Night and Shostakovich’s unfinished opera The Gamblers (both on Capriccio), as well as a recording of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis conducted by Antal Doráti (BIS). He has performed with major opera companies throughout the world. I have not been able to discover the reason for his name change, but it appears that at a certain point he emigrated to the U.S. You would learn little of this history from the Naxos notes.