In the 50 years since his death, Shostakovich’s skill at puncturing the pomposity of inhumane leaders in his music has always seemed topical – and right now it feels tailored to the times. The pianist Evgeny Kissin – last year labelled a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin – is commemorating the half century by immersing himself in Shostakovich’s chamber music.
Kissin the piano soloist has been always technically dazzling and usually loud, so Kissin the chamber musician came as something of a revelation. Here was a true collaborative pianist – never just an accompanist, and often the dominant voice, yet always sensitive and supportive. In the wartime Piano Trio No 2 he took care not to overwhelm the two string players even though Gidon Kremer’s violin playing, so crisp in the hurtling second movement, often felt underpowered. At the beginning of the third movement, though, Kissin let loose a series of chiming chords, the ringing intensity of each seeming to grow rather than recede. It was a world away from the unearthly, barely-there harmonics from Giedrė Dirvanauskaitė’s cello with which the performance had begun – these two moments that outlined the parameters of a work of huge scope.
The evening had started with a rare chance to hear the Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, setting words spoken by one of Dostoevsky’s more insufferable characters. Kissin gave the piano part plenty of character, but nothing could have upstaged the bass Alexander Roslavets, whose vivid delivery of words and assumption of the self-important captain’s character made each of the songs feel like a mini operatic scene.
The Four Verses, premiered in 1975, was Shostakovich’s penultimate work; his swansong was his Viola Sonata, for which Kissin was joined by Maxim Rysanov, who spun long melodic lines that just kept on going. In the second movement, a nervy dance, Rysanov and Kissin built up waves of tension that Rysanov released as if bursting through a pressure valve. The final movement, with its obvious allusions to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and its less obvious quotes from all of Shostakovich’s symphonies, felt truly valedictory, the last words of a composer whose anger at injustice fired him to the end.
