United States ‘Kissin and Friends’ – Shostakovich: Evgeny Kissin (piano), Gautier Capuçon (cello), Gidon Kremer (violin), Maxim Rysanov (viola). Carnegie Hall, New York, 28.5.2025. (ES-S)

Shostakovich – Cello Sonata in D minor, Op.40; Violin Sonata in G major, Op.134; Viola Sonata, Op.147
Not surprisingly, no one has done more in the United States to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich’s death than two of the greatest musicians born and musically trained in the former Soviet Union: Evgeny Kissin and Andris Nelsons. As music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Nelsons curated ‘Decoding Shostakovich’, a multi-week immersion in the composer’s symphonic works. Kissin, for his part, assembled ‘Kissin and Friends’, a chamber series focused on Shostakovich’s sonatas and other intimate works – few, but rich in expressive and emotional depth. Both projects traveled to major European stages, with Nelsons and the BSO making a particularly resonant appearance at Leipzig’s Shostakovich Festival, held in the city where he also serves as Kapellmeister of the Gewandhaus Orchestra.
The first of the two ‘Kissin and Friends’ programs this week was devoted entirely to Shostakovich’s three sonatas for solo string instruments and piano – an intimate, chronological journey through more than four decades of the composer’s output. Kissin offered a program that reflected well his current artistic priorities. In recent years, he has gradually moved away from any gratuitous display of athleticism, adopting a more contemplative and at the same time emotional approach to music making. Kissin was joined by three distinguished collaborators: cellist Gautier Capuçon, violinist Gidon Kremer and violist Maxim Rysanov. The Cello Sonata (1934), the earliest and most frequently performed of the group, balances classical clarity with moments of wit and theatrical energy. The Violin Sonata (1968) is a severe and structurally demanding work, integrating twelve-tone procedures into a bleak and uncompromising sound world. The Viola Sonata (1975), completed just weeks before Shostakovich’s death, is the most introspective and elegiac – its silences as eloquent as its themes. Though similar in format, each sonata inhabits its own expressive world, and together they form a compressed yet revealing chronicle of Shostakovich’s chamber voice across the decades.
The concert opened with the Cello Sonata, the most immediately accessible of the three works. Gautier Capuçon’s generous tone was a defining force from the start – resonant and unforced, his Matteo Goffriller cello projected warmth even in restrained dynamics. In the Allegro non troppo, his phrasing was broad and openly emotive, often leaning toward rubato, while Kissin maintained a more contained rhythmic profile. That contrast extended to the second, major-key theme, which Kissin shaped with warmth and evident affection, though always with inward reserve; Capuçon, by contrast, opened into the phrase physically and lyrically, drawing the melodic line outward. The balance worked to subtle effect, though the contrast between themes could have been more pointed. In the Largo, the cellist offered a long-breathed cantilena of striking poignancy – almost Schubertian in its private lyricism. The muted tone stretched nearly to the point of suspension, more elegy than lullaby. The finale unleashed a manic energy, Capuçon relishing its angular drive while Kissin’s brittle, percussive articulation kept the texture taut. If the performance softened some of the sonata’s irony, it compensated with physical engagement and emotional immediacy.

The Violin Sonata is indeed a severe and structurally demanding work. Written in 1968 as a sixtieth-birthday tribute to the great David Oistrakh, it is anything but festive – its inward severity, stark textures and cryptic twelve-tone framework suggest private reckoning more than public homage. Gidon Kremer, who met Shostakovich during the composer’s final years, brought a sense of personal connection to the work, though the performance occasionally underplayed the tense emotion beneath the surface. In the opening Andante, Kremer’s tone was subdued, his phrasing tentative, and the latent sense of resistance beneath the music’s calm exterior was never fully drawn out. Kissin, steady and unflinching, carried the movement forward with clarity and structural intent. The Allegretto – a kind of grotesque danse macabre – brought a sudden jolt of energy. Kremer responded with greater urgency and boldness, even if his pitch was sporadically unsure. The movement’s acerbic wit, however, remained somewhat muted. It was only in the final movement that a sense of cohesion fully emerged. The passacaglia variations, rather than evolving in close tandem, unfolded through distinct and often solitary statements, with each player taking turns to reflect and withdraw. The performance conveyed a quiet, disjointed dignity – one that suited the music’s unsettled, tinged-with-uncertainty farewell.
The Viola Sonata, Shostakovich’s final composition, brought the recital to a subdued and twilight-colored close. Composed in the summer of 1975 and completed just weeks before his death, it is haunted by allusions to earlier music, cast in a language of extreme restraint. Kissin and violist Maxim Rysanov captured that tension with remarkable sensitivity. From the quiet pizzicatos that opened the Moderato, Rysanov maintained a hushed, focused tone, never drawing undue attention to the line but shaping it with luminous concentration. The movement’s stark alternation between piano and viola – less a dialogue than a sequence of call and withdrawal – echoed the fragmented structure of the Violin Sonata’s passacaglia, though here the gestures felt more reflective and reconciled.
The central Allegretto offered fleeting glimpses of sardonic humor, but each flash was quickly extinguished, overtaken by darker sonorities in the piano or a biting pizzicato that landed like a muted shriek. In the final Adagio, the allusion to Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata surfaced not as quotation but as faded reminiscence, barely stabilized by the tolling piano motif beneath it. The performers sustained a long, luminous line through the final bars, arriving at the score’s morendo not as a dramatic gesture but as a natural expiration. Rysanov played with a radiant inwardness that gave even the silences shape. As in the final pages of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony – a work Shostakovich revered – there was a sense of a soul hovering between resignation and refusal, between the impulse to vanish and the longing to remain. At the same time, in plastic terms, the atmosphere recalled one of Mark Rothko’s late Seagram Murals, where distinctions of form and color slowly dissolve into shadow. What remained was not silence but something just beyond reach – withdrawn, but still perceived.
Edward Sava-Segal