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Reflections: Shostakovich, Bacewicz
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Reflections: Shostakovich, Bacewicz
Current price: $23.99
Barnes and Noble
Reflections: Shostakovich, Bacewicz
Current price: $23.99
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The title
is about as generic as can be, and the murky booklet notes don't help much. Fortunately, the music here can speak for itself, and it is well played, crisp but lyrical when it needs to be. The reflections of the title are those of the composers themselves, their inner feelings, and the degree to which they are audible in the musical surface. The 20th century champion in terms of hidden meanings was
, whose romantic feelings toward his student
provide a kind of program for the
, but also mix with the composer's ambivalent perspectives on the death of
and his own still fragile ideological rehabilitation. The
is ingeniously paired with the
of
. This is an early work that draws on Polish folk music, as per socialist-realist dictates, but proves similarly hard to pin down. As an entr'acte, there are seven of
's
, Bachian piano works here arranged for string quartet. This suffers from the same problem as do string quartet versions of
himself, namely that the textures of the string quartet are anachronistic to the music, but the two main works on the program are nicely illuminated by this somewhat underrated chamber ensemble. ~ James Manheim