DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH 1906-1975

Chamber Symphony in C Minor Opus 110a

1. Largo
2. Allegro molto
3. Allegretto
4. Largo
5. Largo

Shostakovich spent the summer of 1960 working on a film score in the City of Dresden. The desolate environment, with its ever-present reminders of the horrors of war, together with the composer's own experience of the Stalinist years, inspired the composition of his eighth and arguably finest string quartet, which is dedicated to the victims of both war and fascism. The work was subsequently arranged for string orchestra, with the composer's sanction, by his long-standing friend Rudolf Barshai and published under the title of Chamber Symphony.

An impression of stark reality is created by the use of effects which appear to give direct association to the various sounds of warfare, including the noise of bomber planes, sirens, and explosions. But beyond this overtly programmatic content the music carries, in a different way from any of the other quartets, a deep feeling of anguish and the haunting pain of personal mortality.

By the incorporation of quotations from his own earlier works, Shostakovich seems almost to search for and recreate his own bitter past experiences, and this personal involvement is underlined by the motif which introduces the work and which reappears throughout its length: D, E flat, C, B which is Shostakovich's own monogram put into German musical notation. This sequence of notes also happens to embody a recurrent obsession in the composer's mature works, namely the conflict between the intervals of the minor and major third.

Analysts have found in the score echos of the second piano trio, the first, fifth and tenth symphonies, the first 'cello concerto, the operas "Jekaterina Ismailoya" and "Lady Macbeth" together with a Russian revolutionary song and, in the third movement's oriental waltz an old Jewish lament. There is also a more direct reference to the finale of Beethoven's last string quartet.

Yet despite all these quotations and the powerful influence that they exert, the Chamber Symphony stands as a fully independant work whose five movements, played without a break, from a tense span leading from nothing up to a bitterly painful emotional climax and eventually back to a haunting and desolate emptiness