This coming Sunday, at 3 p.m., musicians Ignacy Gaydamovich, Cihan Yücel and Gary Capozziello will sit down on Lyric Hall‘s intimate stage. Gaydamovich, possibly resting his cello for a moment against his knees, will introduce the bill: Sergey Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata, followed by Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2. Yücel, on piano, and Capozziello, on violin, perhaps will nod knowingly. Then a wild, Russian-induced magic will explode from each of them.
Here’s why you should go.
The Rachmaninov, if you are not already in love, will make you want to be in love. Meanwhile, the Shostakovich will shred you completely. The two perform a teasing, devastating dance between vivacity and deep depression, what Gaydamovich calls “love and … death. Putting those two pieces together in a concert is like opening a curtain on life’s eternal debate between the one and the other.”
The young trio has claimed the Shostakovich as one of its prize pieces. If you are an emotional person — or even if you are not — the piece will rip you up and down the body, heart and head. We’re talking 1,000 tiny, dewy bits of flesh, white bone, and marrow that have been systematically dislodged from your body by two minutes in, and just stay there on the floor until an ending that doesn’t have a particular sense of resolution. Written after the death of his musician friend Ivan Sollertinsky (to whom the work is dedicated) in 1944, the 28-minute piece responds to World War II and the Holocaust in particular, which Shostakovich and his contemporaries were just learning about at the time.
The eerie first movement features a whisper of strings that seems perpetually too quiet. One must strain slightly to fully listen. These are muted notes, strings that know to creep cautiously because they are in constant danger of being snuffed out. Until, that is, about three and a half minutes into the piece, when they quicken, full of purpose, a suspenseful spray of piano coming in across them and pulling the listener to the edge of their seat. There’s a seeming resolution-meets-march that the composer described as wobbling drunkenly through a parade, vomiting at one point, and then trying to get out of there (the violin and piano play in a call-and-response that sounds like a wind up doll). It’s a section full of emotion and heart that seems to be soaring upward. But then there’s incredible loss, the sense that the piece is finished, but not.
Courtesy Neyman Artist Management
As Gaydamovich described it in a pre-performance interview, the trio is a love letter, dripping with sarcasm at some points, “to the Russia Shostakovich wants.” And, unfortunately, to the one that, for him, will never exist.
“You have to find some depression and show it,” Gaydamovich said of playing the piece. “Music is basically written down feelings. So in Shostakovich it’s important of course to understand his life. I get to know the composer, I want to become friends with him. The last movement is kind of a dance of fire, so we’re putting all our guts into that.”
Becoming friends with Shostakovich, he is quick to add, is a heartbreaking process. What reassurance comes after the first movement is nixed succinctly in the last, gutting listeners still hoping for their happy endings, the rhapsodic climaxes and piqued conclusions to which most classical music has accustomed them. But it’s that feeling — that your insides are damp, hollowed wood, that small gusts of wind could knock you clear over, ears first, that something devastating is happening over and over again — that makes the piece so very worth listening to.
“Especially with Shostakovich’s music there’s a lot of room for interpretation and each interpretation is different,” said violinist Capozziello. “There’s a flexibility that gives the players some room for their own personal emotion. This piece also is profoundly cohesive in its structure — when you delve into the score, there are elements of the first movement that rise in the finale. We study the work to perform it.”
Members of the trio expect that Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata, when paired with Shostakovich, will transform the afternoon into one of unadulterated emotion in Lyric Hall, a space that is new for them, just as they are new to New Haven’s listeners. Colleagues who met at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, the three came together as a group when Gaydamovich was looking for two pianists, and found a pianist and a violin instead. Since then, they’ve become enthralled by the possibility of traveling while playing Russian chamber music together, exposing audiences to music they may not know, in a configuration that is slightly unusual.
“Playing this music is very exciting because it has to be very personal, because we are including our personal ideas and personal feelings,” said Yücel in the week leading up to the performance. “We knew each other for a very long time in the same degree program, but we always worked individually or as duos. As a trio, it’s a little more like a newborn baby for us.”
“We leave some open [interpretive] space for the performance,” he added. “It’s the way we keep our performances alive, we’re ready to go, and that makes the music really alive for the audience.”