"This evening the outstanding Pyotr Adamovitch Shostakovsky granted us once again with one of his rare pianoforte recitals in the Conservatory's Small Hall. As much as we have always expressed a deep admiration for this master from Kullak's and Liszt's school, he nonetheless gave us reason for complaint this time. It was not his playing, however, which disconcerted us -- we have again and again given it the highest praise, and it secures him one of the front ranks among our country's virtuosos. Rather it was the performance of a so-called Sonate-Fantaisie for the pianoforte which did not add to our enjoyment, even provoking open disagreement. Pyotr Adamovitch seemed to be determined to speak out for the work of a totally unknown contemporary. We at least had not heard the slightest word about Gustav Hansovitch Struempel thus far. Who now is this composer? We were granted to know that he is not only a friend of the virtuoso, but also not a composer at all. If one would mercifully grant him such a rank he doubtlessly would belong to the representatives of a kind of music the character of which is governed by chaos of form and arbitrariness of harmony. When Robert Schumann once called Chopin's Sonata in B flat (with the funeral march) "four of the composer's wildest children" who in a whim had been put together, we instead do not hesitate to call this Sonate-Fantaisie, Opus 5, four illbred scamps of four different fathers, behaving like ruffians and brawlers in the street. Only too desperately a critic would like to avoid giving an account of such a work. Yet it is his duty also to duly warn against such excesses by writing about them. The brave Shostakovsky presented this rather difficult Sonate-Fantaisie, in spite of all its crude and quite poor invention, with his innate powers of persuasion. We instead saw no deeper reason, let alone a musical one, for his decision; whereafter we are inclined to suspect a service of friendship to the composer alone. To the first movement, an Allegro con brio of the most abstruse themes in thick chords, Struempel adds a middle part, alla ballata, sounding quite nice occasionally, but leading nowhere. Abruptly this is followed by a kind of short development which gave our ears pain again through its jumps in melody and harmony. Exhausted the first movement ends already in E flat major without having told us why it had been present. We ourselves felt very similar. It springs easily from his name that Struempel is the son of a German immigrant, which may be the reason why he felt like adding to his sonata a set of seven variations on an old German chorale ("Mit Ernst, o Menschenkinder, das Herz in Euch bestellt"), forming the second movement. Here it became immediatly apparent that our composer totally lacks any thorough schooling in counterpoint, even though he tries to follow the all-time models of this art. The first as well as the second variation, coming along with continuous figuration, cannot deny to have their origin in Bach's manner. In that respect, the central fourth variation in E flat minor is another example how he tries to suck honey from the work of the great cantor - similar to Herr Busoni, whose short guest part in Moscow years ago has remained not unclouded in our memory. If the variations are very similar in their characters, the sequence of harmonies instead seems all too often to bear again the imprint of arbitrariness. Hardly does one feel to have entered solid ground at last, when Struempel pushes one again into the next abyss. With a clumsy fugato he starts the last of his variations, accompanies the noble melody of the chorale with chaotic thundering and lets it sink afterwards with earsplitting noise into the deep registers of an excessively maltreated pianoforte. Here the opus could have justly found its end and the listeners the silence they had desparately longed for, because a marked commotion of the audience, already during the playing, seemed to wish for an end of the spectacle. Alas, we became the prisoners of a further two movements which Pyotr Adamovitch could only start after adressing the tortured public with some words of appeasement: an Andante, at the beginning reminding one vaguely of our folk songs, only to shift soon into a Polish "à la Mazur" and even into the Scottish way with bagpipe fifths, and the Finale, Allegro con fuoco. This latter movement, interspersed with many changes of tempo and mood, seemed to us to be perhaps the most effective part of this ineffective sonata. Even though the composer makes some effort to give his work as a whole some coherence by inventing similar themes - he seems to be taken by the upward jump of the fourth. Even though he repeats a part of the first movement at the end of the Finale, thus following the example of our best modern composers: he does not succeed in any way to create a convincing whole, which became apparent in the most devastating way in comparison to what Pyotr Adamovitch Shostakovsky had presented us in the first part of his recital with the Sonate pathétique and the Sonata appassionata of the great Beethoven. Had the applause for this part been big and thankful, hardly any hands clapped after Struempel's failure, if one doesn't count very few and obnoxious claqueurs whose motives we would rather abstain to judge. As we could further find out, Gustav Hansovitch Struempel's actual profession is that of a competent engineer at His Majesty the Tzar's railways. As the composer had not been present on the evening, we would allow us to suggest a not too bizarre presumption, namely that foreseeing the disaster, he had left by train for the only recently accessible ranges of Siberia." "Unknown" * * * |