Bresciaoggi
Praise for Massimo Paris’s interpretation of Shostakovich’s late Viola Sonata, with Miyuki Washimiya at the piano. Published in the newspaper’s classical record column.
Da Vinci Classics
Massimo Paris, Miyuki Washimiya
Physical and Digital Release: 19 January 2018
The Viola Sonata, Op. 147, alongside Paris’s arrangements of the Cello Sonata, Op. 40, and the Adagio from Ballet Suite No. 2.
Dmitri Shostakovich: Works for Viola and Piano
Massimo Paris , viola · Miyuki Washimiya , piano
13.67€
Digital programme · 8 tracks
Track timings refer to the digital edition. The Cello Sonata and Adagio are heard in Massimo Paris’s arrangements for viola.
Born in Rome, Massimo Paris is a versatile musician: a soloist on viola and viola d’amore, composer, conductor and teacher. His career has taken him to major concert halls around the world, including Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher and Alice Tully Halls in New York; Teatro alla Scala, Milan; the Berlin Philharmonie; the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome; the Paris Opera; the Amsterdam Concertgebouw; London’s Royal Festival Hall and Barbican; the Sydney Opera House; Tokyo’s Bunka Kaikan and Suntory Hall; Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires; and the Leipzig Gewandhaus.
A viola and viola d’amore soloist with Renato Fasano’s I Virtuosi di Roma, he joined I Musici as principal viola in 1977. In 1994 he became a founding member of the Stradivari String Quartet. His chamber-music partners have included Pina Carmirelli, Michele Campanella, Bruno Canino, Giuliano Carmignola, Severino Gazzelloni, Bruno Giuranna, Peter-Lukas Graf, Heinz and Ursula Holliger, Rafael Orozco, Boris Pergamenschikow, Menahem Pressler, Franco Petracchi, Pepe Romero and Los Romeros, and Christian Zacharias. He has also played with the Academica, Artis and Orpheus quartets, the Trio di Milano, and members of the Beaux Arts and Eroica trios and the Guarneri, Emerson and Orlando quartets.
His festival appearances include Marlboro, where he was invited by Rudolf Serkin; Montreux; Edinburgh; Lucerne; Schleswig-Holstein; Mostly Mozart in New York; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Orlando; and Spoleto. He composes symphonic and chamber music. His Christmas Suite, dedicated to Los Romeros, was recorded for Deutsche Grammophon. His cadenzas for Alessandro Rolla’s Viola Concertos and his set of eighteen cadenzas for Locatelli’s L’arte del violino were recorded for Philips.
Paris combines performing with conducting and is a founding member of Accademia Musicale Italiana and Concerto Málaga. His teaching appointments have included viola and chamber music at the Musikhochschule Köln’s Aachen campus and postgraduate teaching at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. He has given masterclasses in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Venezuela, Mexico, the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, and has served on international competition juries.
He has recorded for radio and television in Europe, the United States, South America, Japan and Australia. His discography includes Columbia, Denon, Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, Sony, Arcadia, Eloquence, Brilliant Classics, Genuin, Dynamic, Claves, Epic and Da Vinci Classics, as well as three charity CDs for UNICEF.
Miyuki Washimiya was born in Tokyo and graduated from the Conservatoire Européen de Musique de Paris and the Toho Gakuen School of Music. Her awards include recognition at the fifty-sixth Japan Music Competition, second prize in the chamber-music category of the UFAM International Competition, third prize at the Japan Chamber Music Competition, and second prize in the two-piano, four-hand category of the International Piano Duo Competition, where she achieved the highest placing among Japanese participants. She was also selected as the best student at the Tours International Music Academy for two consecutive years.
She has performed in Japan, Taiwan, the United States, Canada, England, France and Singapore, appearing as an orchestral soloist, recitalist and chamber musician. She is a founding member of the Omega Trio, with violinist Kenta Matsumi and cellist Ken Karatsu.
Her chamber-music collaborators include Massimo Paris of I Musici, Christoph Hartmann of the Berlin Philharmonic, Jian Wang, Maxence Larrieu, Gilbert Audin of Les Vents Français and Mischa Maisky. Her performances have been broadcast on NHK FM and Japanese television, and she has released several recordings.
Dmitri Shostakovich: (b St Petersburg, 12/25 Sept 1906; d Moscow, 9 Aug 1975). Russian composer. He is generally regarded as the greatest symphonist of the mid-20th century, and many of his string quartets, concertos, instrumental and vocal works are also firmly established in the repertory. His numerous film scores, extensive incidental theatre music and three ballets are of more variable quality. In 1936, political intervention cut short his potentially outstanding operatic output; such interference continued to blight his career, belying the outward signs of official favour and recognition that increasingly came his way. Amid the conflicting pressures of official requirements, the mass suffering of his fellow countrymen, and his personal ideals of humanitarianism and public service, he succeeded in forging a musical language of colossal emotional power. The music of his middle period is often epic in scale and content; it has been understood by many Russians, and in more recent years also by Westerners, as chronicling his society and times, conveying moods and, as some would argue, experiences and even political messages in notes, at a time when to do so in words was proscribed. Since the appearance in 1979 of his purported memoirs, which expressed profound disaffection from the Soviet regime, his works have been intensely scrutinized for evidence of such explicit communication. However, his intentions in this respect continue to provoke disagreement, not least because of the problematic status of the sources involved. He published articles and made speeches under varying degrees of duress; for much of his life his correspondence was liable to be read by censors; he destroyed almost all letters sent to him; he kept no diary; and his reported confidences to friends and family are of varying reliability. Meanwhile, the musical dimensions of his works remain comparatively little examined. He played a decisive role in the musical life of the former Soviet Union, as teacher, writer and administrator. He was also an active pianist, frequently performing his own works until disability prevented him. His last concert appearance was in 1966
Shostakovich: Works for Viola and Piano Album notes by Edmondo Filippini, originally translated by Fabiana Binarelli. English revised. Shostakovich’s music occupies a central place in the development of twentieth-century musical language, offering a powerful alternative to the path taken by the Second Viennese School. His distinctive style repeatedly looks back to the past, seeking roots that could sustain an individual voice under the pressures of a totalitarian regime. This struggle can be heard in his symphonic works and, in a more intimate form, in his chamber music. He stands not…
Album notes by Edmondo Filippini, originally translated by Fabiana Binarelli. English revised.
Shostakovich’s music occupies a central place in the development of twentieth-century musical language, offering a powerful alternative to the path taken by the Second Viennese School. His distinctive style repeatedly looks back to the past, seeking roots that could sustain an individual voice under the pressures of a totalitarian regime. This struggle can be heard in his symphonic works and, in a more intimate form, in his chamber music. He stands not only among the defining figures of his own age, but among the major composers in the history of music.
Prolific across many genres, Shostakovich found in chamber music a particularly concentrated means of expression. His fifteen string quartets—rather than the twenty-four he had envisaged—and his three major sonatas for an instrument with piano have become central to the repertoire. In chronological order, these are the Cello Sonata, Op. 40, heard here in Massimo Paris’s arrangement for viola; the Violin Sonata, Op. 134; and the Viola Sonata, Op. 147.
The Viola Sonata is both his final completed composition and a summation of his late musical language. Its references to earlier works, its concentrated expression and its remarkable conclusion invite us to hear it as the final destination of a long and complex artistic journey. We may imagine that Shostakovich sensed how little time remained, although the work’s significance does not depend on proving such an intention.
The manuscript was completed on 5 July 1975 and dedicated to the violist Fyodor Druzhinin. Shostakovich died on 9 August. Druzhinin and pianist Mikhail Muntian gave a private performance for friends and colleagues at the composer’s apartment on his birthday, 25 September 1975, followed by the public premiere in Leningrad on 1 October. The sonata was soon taken up by violists elsewhere in Europe and came to be regarded both as the composer’s musical testament and as a major addition to the viola repertoire. The instrument is explored with exceptional insight and expressive understanding.
Shostakovich characterised the first two movements as a “novella” and a “scherzo”. Their language recalls his other late works, with tensions and shifting atmospheres arising from the interaction of contrasting themes. The second movement reuses material from his unfinished opera The Gamblers, based on Gogol’s play. The music finds a new conclusion within the sonata, in a movement poised between polka and quick march that brings the composer’s irony and critical energy sharply into focus.
The final Adagio is the sonata’s emotional centre. Its allusion to Beethoven’s Sonata, Op. 27 No. 2, the Moonlight, opens a world of recollection and mourning. The recurring motif assumes the character of a funeral lament, around which references to Shostakovich’s own music accumulate. The original album commentary hears in this movement a survey of his symphonic past and memories of the Second Violin Concerto. Particularly moving is the recollection of the Suite for Two Pianos, written when he was sixteen after his father’s death and dedicated to his memory. The final resolution in C major offers a fragile possibility of serenity: a profoundly affecting conclusion to the composer’s creative life.
The Cello Sonata, Op. 40, represents a much earlier stage of that journey. Composed in 1934, before the notorious public denunciation of 1936, it belongs to a difficult period in Shostakovich’s private life, when he and his wife Nina were briefly separated. Although an early work, it already contains expressive traits that would remain central to his later music. In this recording, Massimo Paris’s arrangement transfers its four movements to viola and piano.
The final piece has a different place in Shostakovich’s output. Its Adagio comes from The Limpid Stream—also known as The Bright Stream—and was included in the Second Ballet Suite, assembled by Lev Atovmyan in 1951. The ballet itself had been attacked in 1936, in an earlier phase of the political pressure that would return in the campaign against composers associated with the Zhdanov decree of 1948. Atovmyan’s later arrangements helped music from the stage works reach a new audience.
This brief piece reveals a more openly lyrical side of Shostakovich, beyond the grave public image often associated with his Beethovenian stature. A forceful and dramatic piano opening leads to a central passage of expansive lyricism, at moments suggesting the similarly expressive slow movement of the Second Piano Concerto. The Adagio became familiar in the cello-and-piano arrangement and is heard here in Paris’s version for viola.
Massimo Paris — viola and arrangements of the Cello Sonata, Op. 40, and the Adagio.
Miyuki Washimiya — piano.
Recorded in January 2016 at Coppice Miyoshi, Saitama, Japan.
Director and recording engineer: Yukio Kojima.
Digital editing: Jun Kawanami.
Piano tuner: Joji Moronuki.
Photograph in the booklet: Patrizia Savarese.
Production, design and art direction: OMK-Da Vinci.
Printed with the support of S.P.L.M.
Selected awards, reviews and interviews. Radio broadcasts and podcasts are listed separately below.
Bresciaoggi
Praise for Massimo Paris’s interpretation of Shostakovich’s late Viola Sonata, with Miyuki Washimiya at the piano. Published in the newspaper’s classical record column.
Broadcasts, conversations and listening features dedicated to this recording.
Rai Radio 3 · Primo Movimento
Selected for the programme’s disc review segment on this date.
Same artist
Same composer
Same composer
Same composer