Beware of Music Critics in the Bureaucracy
by Leonard Lehrman ©2008
Melvin Chen plays Dmitri SHOSTAKOVICH: Dances of the Dolls; Ten Aphorisms; Sonatas #1&2. Bridge 9238. Time: 67:17
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was a nervous chain smoker. I missed out on meeting him when I was in Moscow and Leningrad in 1971, as he was ill, but did meet a number of his colleagues (including Sofia [“Sonia”] Gubaidulina) who assured me that his publicly welcoming official criticism in 1936 and 1948 hid an extremely restless and discontented interior: “How would you like it if some bureaucrat told YOU how to write music?” they asked me, rhetorically. Dances of the Dolls is a fairly innocuous 1952 children’s suite drawn from ballets, film scores and theatre music of the early 1930s. The Aphorisms, op. 13 (1927), contain some of the most interesting and idiosyncratic writing of the period, comparable to contemporaneous works of Bartók, Schönberg, and the early Sessions. The Sonatas, op. 12 & 61 (1926, 1943), especially the latter, in B-minor, lean more on traditional classical form and tonality.
Melvin Chen, a physicist and chemist as well as a pianist—and violinist—with degrees from Harvard, Yale and Juilliard, represents the new generation, teaching and recording at Bard College Conservatory, where he serves as associate director. Though he has participated in ensemble recordings of works by Joan Tower, Earl Kim, and Ricky Ian Gordon, this would seem to be his first solo album of 20th century music. He serves it well. Now perhaps he should take on Shostakovich’s Preludes & Fugues, which I fondly remember assembling from various recordings, commercial and home-made, for its first U.S. radio broadcast at Harvard in 1968.
