Censorship can take many forms. For its debut CD on the Delos label, New York-based chamber orchestra Parlando is exploring 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.
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. 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 in his 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.
Weinberg owed his career to Shostakovich, who discovered the former’s 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 Soviet regime launched a new assault on all 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 the composer’s “nervous energy” with “anger bubbling underneath.”
Violinist Aubree Oliverson delivers a stunning account here, capturing the first movement’s anxious lyricism, the second’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 the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall in Los Angeles on March 15.
Little known in the West, Mirzoyan, an Armenian composer, 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, serving as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Armenia and as an official in the Armenian Composers’ Union (as well as its all-Soviet counterpart). In these positions, 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, Mirzoyan (like Shostakovich) wrote 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, including Aram Khachaturian. Later, Mirzoyan 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 history, when ethnic minorities in the USSR were allowed a greater degree of cultural 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, whether pounding out an insistent rhythm to a furious fugue in the first movement or providing quiet ostinato accompaniment to an Armenian folk song surrounded by what Niederhoffer describes as an “eerie fog” in the strings in the second. Solemn echoes of Armenian composer Komitas suffuse the requiem-like third movement. The cheerful finale treats another folk tune in the fashion of Béla Bartók.
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 may not tell the whole story promised in the album’s title, but the vigorous performances, enhanced by excellent production, make for invigorating listening.
