Cellist Nicolas Altstaedt and singer Anna-Lena Elbert perform Ophelia’s Song op.127 by Shostakovich. The performance was recorded and produced at ConcertLab.
ConcertLab is a purpose‑built fine art music studio, complete with an illuminated resonant stage and adjustable acoustics. Equipped with the world’s only silent indoor drone camera, housed in a 16th century monument in Utrecht, it enables ConcertLab to create high‑end, minimalist films – fusing heritage with innovation to offer musicians exceptional artistic freedom.
Manfred Koerth writes on the work: ’Foremost among the works for solo voice by the Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich are the collection From Jewish Folk Poetry (1956) and the present cycle op.127 on poems by Alexander Blok.
’The Blok cycle was premiered in Moscow in fall 1967 by the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, to whom it was dedicated, the violinist David Oistrakh, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the pianist ( and composer ) Moisey Weinberg.
’In the Blok songs, the composer combines the three obbligato instruments in a variety of ways with each other and with the vocal part so as to produce a panoply of contrasting forms which exploit all the possibilities of tone-painting inherent in the proliferating images and moods in Blok’s lyrics.’
No comments yet