Taking Shostakovich Out

Context and meaning exist in relationship, and this is as apparent in life as it is in art. How we understand and use a language clearly impacts our engagement with the world we inhabit, our perceptions and our interpretations of it. Do ideas have their own innate pure meaning or does this arise only from our relationship with them?

Music, that most fluid of our arts, is a paradoxically emphatic and liberal conveyor of meaning, idea and culture. Just consider for a moment the startlingly disparate political and social ideologies to which the music of Wagner and Beethoven have famously been attached. As a composer living in communist Russia, Shostakovich (1906 - 1975) had to navigate an often shifting political context that could quickly impact the perceived meaning of his music.

Symphonic writing by its nature, tends to the more public sphere and equally perhaps, the more intimate character of string quartet or piano music to the more personal.

Shostakovich wrote his 24 preludes and fugues on his return from the Bicentennial Bach competitions in Leipzig in 1950 (in a blistering surge of creativity spanning a mere three and a half months). Although clearly written as a complete cycle the works component parts each posses a wonderfully distinct character, and it is this diversity within the strict confines of 'academic fugue' that allows us to (as Alexander Melnikov writes in the liner notes to his Harmonia Mundi recording of the cycle in 2008/'09) appreciate “...the sheer amount of virtuosity and genius required..." from Shostakovich to create such a composition.

The idea for this recording comes in part, from an interest in exploring the impulses from which the demands of improvised music can spring - what kind of material? - an entire tune, a few notes, a theme, a texture, a sound - how does the starting point impact an immediate response? but also the question of context and meaning. If we take an idea and put it somewhere else, what will it reveal? How will we perceive it? What unexpected insights might arise?

'Taking Shostakovich Out' is an exploration of these kinds of concerns; an allusion to the importance of creativity, open mindedness, free will and the vitality of the human spirit.