The final program in Evgeny Kissin’s three-concert celebration of Shostakovich began with the composer’s penultimate creation, Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, a setting of words spoken by the loathsome character who affected to be a poet in Dostoyevsky’s 1871 novel, The Possessed. Kissin shaped a characterful reading of the piano part, but it was Alexander Roslavets, with his powerful bass and vivid delivery of the semi-deranged texts, who owned the stage in this highly dramatic account.
With Kissin leading, the Kopelman Quartet – whose members worked with Shostakovich on his late String Quartets as founding members of the Moscow String Quartet – gave an exciting rendering of the Piano Quintet with impeccable skill, fully revealing the symphonic breadth of the work. The Fugue was rendered with enormous concentration and a wide range of timbre and dynamics, the biting humor of the central Scherzo splendidly pointed. After the heartrending Intermezzo with its relentless tolling pulse from the cello’s pizzicatos, the rhapsodic Finale was exquisitely managed.
The enigmatic Second Piano Trio honors the composer’s friend, the polymath Ivan Sollertinsky, who died in the year of its composition, 1944. Kissin, Gidon Kremer and Giedrė Dirvanauskaitė brought out the painful and anguished music with superb playing, the standout moments were the delicately withdrawn pianissimo cello at the beginning of the Andante first movement and the piano’s increasingly insistent intonation of the chiming chords at the opening of the Largo.
Variously scored for soprano, mezzo and tenor, the 11 songs in From Jewish Folk Poetry feature Russian translations of Yiddish texts. Kissin provided excellent accompaniments for the singers, all of whom performed with wonderful character and nuance. Susanna Phillips’s bright soprano was ideally paired with Sasha Cooke’s full-bodied mezzo in the sprightly dialogue of ‘The Thoughtful Mother and Aunt’ (with its memorable ‘bye-bye-bye’ syllables), and John Matthew Myers displayed a lovely tenor in the incongruously buoyant ‘Song of Misery’. The vocal trio offered a bleak and shiveringly atmospheric rendition in ‘Winter’, but the highlight was Cooke’s doleful and rhapsodic cantillation of ‘Lullaby’, set against Kissin’s equally mournful bass line.
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