With Technique to Burn
Cellist Natalia Khoma
A CHAMBER MUSIC STUNNER describes the second Charleston Music Fest concert at the Simons Center Friday night:
Cellist Natalia Khoma, violinist Dmitri Berlinsky, and pianist Volodymyr Vynnytsky programmed two heavy-going works by Dmitri Shostakovitch (1906-1975): his Cello and Piano Sonata in D Minor, Op. 40 (1934) and Second Piano Trio in E Minor, Op.67 (1944).
Hearing this music played by international, star-quality musicians who understand the idiom and who are all natives of the former Soviet Union (Ukraine and Russia) guaranteed authentic insight into these extraordinary chamber works.
Khoma and Vynnytsky intuitively performed the cello sonata—a monumental work, symphonic in proportions—with lyrical sections offset with angst-ridden, eerie, and despairing episodes. With instrumental technique to burn, this duo recreated the drama and typical sarcastic comments that Shostakovitch interjected in his most serious works.
Khoma’s intense cello playing brought out her instrument’s warm qualities as well as its eerie and unsettling sounds. Her powerful attacks were devastating.
Pianist Volodymyr Vynnytsky
Vynnytsky played the Yamaha grand piano with thundering chords and delicate patterns, demonstrating a skill with dynamics that few other pianists can achieve. His speed was phenomenal when called for, as were his lightening attacks.
Violinist Berlinsky joined the cello and piano for the piano trio, an exhausting work with ferocious vision. Shostakovitch loved to incorporate folk and peasant dances, artificial gaiety, and ethnic music with his majestic, yet often grim, vision. The trio understood each of these phases in the composition.
Opening with a frightening and grisly sound on the violin and cello—both playing sul ponticello (on the instrument’s bridge)—this composition had extra meaning for the composer: the death of a friend. Shostakovitch incorporated a sort of Dance of Death in the third movement: strummed chords on the cello and violin in the style of a Cossack dance. He placed Jewish folk music in the trio’s fourth movement where Violinist Berlinsky was in top form, with exquisite and dashing bowing and finger work.
Violinist Dmitri Berlinsky
In Solomon Volkov’s “Testimony–The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovitch,” Shostakovitch is quoted as saying:
…Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it, it is multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It is always laughter through tears.
The quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long, that they learned to hide their despair. They express the despair as dance music.
The outsized aspect of this music seemed to present no unreachable challenge to these performers. The work struck me as a requiem, made universal by the composer’s poetic musical insight.
The audience (more than were there Thursday night) gave the artists two standing ovations, one for the sonata and one for the trio. Khoma, Berlinsky, and Vynnytsky focused on this music as few others do.
Read our review of the first night’s performance.
Natalia Khoma co-directs Charleston Music Fest with Lee-Chin Siow.
