Censorship can take many forms. For its debut CD, on the DELOS label, New York-based chamber ensemble Parlando explores the impact of ideological censorship imposed by the Soviet Communist regime, focusing on three composers: Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975), Mieczysław Weinberg (1919–1996), and Edvard Mirzoyan (1921–2012). Thoughtful performances of key works, supplemented with audio commentary by conductor Ian Niederhoffer — who founded Parlando in 2019 — show how these three very different personalities managed to survive and compose “with a KGB agent in the room.”
Soviet leaders beginning with Vladimir Lenin, eager to create a society based on rational, scientific Marxist principles, feared music’s power to inflame human emotions and sought to control it. Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin. and his cultural commissars created a rigid system of artistic unions that enforced the official doctrine of Soviet socialist realism through the promise of rewards and the threat of punishment and silencing.
As is well known, Shostakovich’s brilliant and racy 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District provoked the first and most famous display of Stalinist censorship in music. When Stalin got around to seeing the opera at the Bolshoi Theatre, its explicit sexual content and “inaccessible” musical style so enraged him that he had it banned from Soviet stages. Attacked in a front-page article in Pravda as a dangerous decadent, Shostakovich feared for his very life but eventually adapted to the ever-changing norms of censorship and continued to compose music (including some propaganda potboilers) for the next four decades.
One of the most emotionally powerful moments in Lady Macbeth comes early on when, in a mournful aria, Katerina bemoans her sad fate as a neglected and sexually unfulfilled wife in an arranged marriage. In 1931, Shostakovich arranged this aria for string quartet in the Two Pieces for String Quartet. Niederhoffer here conducts his own string arrangement of the piece, a languid waltz, but the stolid performance lacks rhythmic definition and folksy flavor.
Mieczysław Weinberg owed his career to Shostakovich, who discovered his music and brought him to Moscow in 1943. Weinberg had been living in Tashkent, after escaping first his native Poland in 1939, and then the Soviet city of Minsk, just ahead of the Nazis. As a Jew, Weinberg came under intense suspicion in the anti-Semitic environment of the late 1940s, when the regime launched a new assault on all Soviet creative artists. (His father-in-law, a famous Jewish actor, was murdered by the KGB.)
Despite such fraught circumstances, Weinberg composed his masterful Concertino for Violin and String Orchestra, Op. 42, in 1948, a testament to his resilience, courage, and power of concentration. Niederhoffer believes that the Concertino, less challenging than some of Weinberg’s earlier, thornier scores, reflects Weinberg’s “nervous energy,” with “anger bubbling underneath.”
Violinist Aubree Oliverson delivers a stunning account here, capturing the anxious lyricism of the opening movement, the second movement’s desperate sorrow with its spiky opening cadenza, and the driving rhythmic climax of the finale. She has excellent support from Parlando’s string ensemble under Niederhoffer’s strong leadership. This is a piece that deserves to be better known — and in fact, it will be included in an all-Weinberg program with the RVC Ensemble at Colburn Conservatory’s Zipper Hall in Los Angeles, on March 15.
Little known in the West, Armenian composer Edvard Mirzoyan enjoyed a very successful career in Soviet music. Born in the Georgian town of Gori (Stalin’s birthplace), he moved to Armenia as a child. Eventually, he rose to powerful positions within the Soviet musical hierarchy, as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Armenia and as an official in the Armenian and all-Soviet Composers’ Union. In this position, he was more likely enforcing censorship than suffering from it, an important point Niederhoffer fails to make in his commentary. In the 1940s and early 1950s, he wrote (like Shostakovich) numerous obligatory official patriotic works such as his Cantata about Lenin.
Living in Moscow after World War II, Mirzoyan began writing thoroughly “Russified” music that dismayed his Armenian colleagues, who included Aram Khachaturian. Later, he returned to his Armenian roots, as in the popular Symphony for String Orchestra and Timpani, composed in 1962 during a more liberal period in Soviet cultural and musical history, when ethnic minorities in the USSR were allowed a greater degree of expression. Whether censorship (or its removal) influenced the composition of the Symphony, or whether it was simply the result of Mirzoyan’s own creative and professional development, is not entirely clear.
In any case, Parlando’s vigorous, exciting performance of this colorful tribute to various traditions in Armenian music is the disc’s highlight. The timpani take center stage, providing quiet ostinato accompaniment to an Armenian folk song surrounded by what Niederhoffer describes as an “eerie fog” in the strings in the second movement, or pounding out an insistent rhythm to a furious fugue in the first movement. Solemn echoes of Armenian composer Komitas suffuse the requiem-like third movement. The cheerful finale treats another folk tune, in Bartókian fashion.
Niederhoffer’s concluding commentary mostly treads upon familiar historical and biographical ground but is particularly enlightening on Mirzoyan’s Symphony, which he calls an expression of the “joy and resilience of the Armenian people.”
Parlando’s motto is “Every concert tells a story.” Censored Anthems doesn’t really tell the whole story promised in the title, but the vigorous performances, enhanced by excellent production, make for invigorating listening.