Chamber works trace dictator’s grip

DURING a performance of Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Tuesday night, a gentleman nervously, arrhythmically tapped his foot. What with the hall’s sensitive acoustics, the percussive intrusion was irritating -- but not inapt. Josef Stalin has been dead 54 years, yet the memory of the “Man of Steel” can still cause involuntary tremors.

The trio, world-turned-upside-down music written in 1944, concluded the first concert in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Shadow of Stalin,” an exploration of politics and art through concerts, symposiums and films that will occupy the orchestra for the next month. The morbid fascination with what the Russian dictator wrought is particularly strong these days, as is a nostalgia for times when artists courageously reflected on, and even influenced, world events.

Evidence that Stalin’s shadow still looms large over our imagination can be found in such recent novels as William T. Vollmann’s epic “Europe Central” and Martin Amis’ “House of Meetings.” And surely the ever-growing popularity of Shostakovich’s symphonies is related to their supposed chronicling of the nasty cat-and-mouse game the tyrant played with the composer.

Tuesday’s program, part of the Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Society series, was modest in scope. But in the way that aptly selected small scenes from life in a narrative can suggest pressing historical themes, four works of chamber music, three of them relatively minor, revealed a zeitgeist of mounting fear.

Prokofiev’s “Overture on Hebrew Themes,” which began the program, was written in 1930, two years before Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili -- who changed his name to Stalin, from the Russian for “steel” -- became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee and ushered in his reign of terror. (The attraction of both Prokofiev and Shostakovich to Jewish folk music is a curiosity. Neither composer was Jewish, and works such as Prokofiev’s overture for clarinet, piano and string quartet were evidently political statements against Russian anti-Semitism.)

The short overture, with its klezmer overtones, is innocuous, tuneful music of relatively untroubled times, music from Prokofiev’s Parisian years, before his return to his homeland in 1924, when there was still hope for Soviet society. Shostakovich’s trio, which closed the concert and which also ends with an allusion to Jewish folk song, is music of a society forever changed.

Written during the Nazi occupation of Russia and in memory of the death of a friend, Shostakovich’s score is a masterpiece of white-hot anxiety. It begins with the cello playing in high harmonics and the violin playing down low. It ends in a grotesque dance of death -- the Jewish music.

Between these extremes came Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins -- passionate, interesting, more abstract music, also from Paris -- and Galina Ustvolskaya’s Clarinet Trio, written in 1949, when she was 30. A pupil of Shostakovich, to whom he twice proposed marriage, Ustvolskaya rejected her mentor in more ways than one. She burned his letters and went her own way musically. He quoted her (a theme from the trio turns up in his Fifth String Quartet); she didn’t need his music.

Ustvolskaya, who died last year, has strong claim to being history’s angriest composer. Her early trio may not be as violent or original as her later work, but it maps out a new path nonetheless. It starts with a Prokofiev-like clarinet solo. The piano comes in with grim, Shostakovichian bass underpinnings. But by the time the violin enters, about two minutes into the 16-minute piece, she has established a unique, gripping, Cassandra-like voice.

She didn’t write much in her career. She was a recluse. Yet Ustvolskaya was a political and spiritual conscience of ferocious power; every note of hers I’ve heard grabs you by the throat.

The excellent performance by clarinetist David Howard, violinist Johnny Lee and pianist Vicki Ray made the trio sound very modern, Russian music by way of Messiaen. Mark Baranov (violin), Barry Gold (cello) and Lina Targonsky (piano) approached Shostakovich’s trio as brilliant, startling drama. A rhapsodic Mark Kashper and razor-sharp Lee brought two different styles of violin playing to Prokofiev’s sonata, which was exciting.

A more carefree interpretation of his overture, which featured Howard, might have suited a different sort of evening. Here it was somber. These players knew from the start just where Russia was headed.

mark.swed@latimes.com