The Sound of Sorrow

Shostakovich’s haunted, morbid 15th String Quartet, written in the hospital a year before he died, is the opposite of a restorative. The Russian composer, who found hundreds of ways of portraying his personal torment along with the terror of his times in Soviet Russia, did not go gently into the night. He went with anger and agony, publicly displayed.

The 35-minute quartet consists of six connected movements, five very slow and one even slower. I have always heard it as a monstrous nightmare. Shostakovich seems to be saying that no matter how much you have ever suffered, however bad your life may have been, it’s nothing, nothing, compared to what he went through. And here is a sour, sorrowful, self-centered score to prove it.

Yet this most implacable of all string quartets is what the Emerson String Quartet has chosen to give itself a new lease on life and help reinvent the presentation of string quartet music in the process. Collaborating with the British theater company Complicite, the Emerson has turned Shostakovich’s quartet into an 80-minute theater piece, “The Noise of Time,” which was produced by Lincoln Center and arrived at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse on Wednesday for five performances through Saturday.

Consequently, the fact that “Noise of Time” accomplishes exactly what it set out to do is startling. Simon McBurney, the director who founded Complicite and conceived “Noise of Time,” realizes that the increasing fascination with Shostakovich in the quarter-century since his death is biographical as well as musical. To understand his music, we must understand him and his world. We must be transported back into a society in which music was dangerous; in which Stalin could act as a lethal music critic; in which Shostakovich, a neurotic man to begin with, carried the weight of oppression on his trembling shoulders.

Complicite takes us back to that time with marvelous simplicity. A radio liberated from “The Twilight Zone” is illuminated on a darkened stage. The dial turns and the broadcasts become earlier and earlier in history--Elvis dies, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin is launched into space....

For the first 45 minutes, Shostakovich’s life comes to us in flashbacks. It is as though we enter into the dying man’s delirium. The sounds are from historic radio broadcasts and remembrances, spoken narrative and snatches of recorded music. The sights are projections onto a wall of quivering sheets of papers and inventive movements for four actors, who appear as shadows of the four members of the string quartet and of the composer himself.

The swift illuminations of Shostakovich and his life all seem to come as if from popping flashbulbs on a black stage. Comprehension is always just out of grasp, and the brilliance of this production is that each new bit of information makes us want more. Further description here would not be useful, because surprise is the method of this inventive company.

The performance of the quartet is the final portion, and it is exceptional. The Emerson is celebrating its 25th anniversary this season (the ensemble was formed two years after Shostakovich’s death). It is one of the most impressive of American string quartets, and Philip Setzer, Eugene Drucker, Lawrence Dutton and David Finckel have remained its only members. But its lush, muscular, sometimes annoying macho sound had begun to lose its freshness.

It is not the first string quartet to look to theater for rejuvenation. But “Noise of Time” is a stretch for the Emersons, and stretch they do with tremendous skill and concentration. They play Shostakovich’s quartet by memory, of course, and that is liberating all by itself. They play in striking formations, standing or sitting. Most extraordinary of all: They don’t face each other, as they do in a concert setting, but face the audience. The communication is direct and electrifying.

McBurney does a remarkable job of bringing Shostakovich to life, and the way the Emerson continues that spirit is a revelation. The Shostakovich revealed here does not succumb to self-pity but rises to one last act of defiance, which was always the most attractive aspect in his music’s personality. “The Noise of Time” becomes a giant fist raised at death and at totalitarianism.

As if more confirmation of the power of this show were necessary, it can be found in the continuing new life it seems to have brought to the Emerson. The ensemble now plays standing up in its concerts--it did so last weekend for a marathon of the six Bartok quartets at Lincoln Center. And it will be fascinating to see just how the players handle this quartet (and other late Shostakovich and late Beethoven strings quartets) when they appear at the Ojai Festival in June.

“The Noise of Time” repeats tonight at 8 and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., $16-$50, Freud Playhouse, UCLA, (310) 825-2101.