Manitoba Live Music Event

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Sarah McElravy  one of Canada’s top string players, joins our Music Director  Anne Manson  to perform Shostakovich’s last work, his exquisite Viola Sonata. A golden trinity.  

As someone who’s mastered both violin and viola, it’s no wonder that Sarah is considered “a consummate musician” (Naples Daily News). At this concert, it will be her 1785 Lorenzo Storioni viola — rather than her 1791 Ferdinando Gagliano violin — on which she wows audiences with her “exquisitely sculpted … divine sound” (The Prague Post). 

It wouldn’t be a signature Shostakovich piece if it weren’t shot through with themes of struggle.  His experiments with modernist sounds sometimes got him in serious trouble with Soviet cultural authorities. Not one to go down without a fight, sly critiques of communism can be found throughout his art. This is reflected in his DSCH motif; a war-cry to individualism that weaves in and out of his body of work. 

However, if there’s a struggle in the Viola Sonata it seems to be with S’s impending death. Composed as his health was declining, the work premiered three months after his death in 1975. But it’s a gorgeous work that ends with redemption: inspired by Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, the sonata is “catharsis … life, struggle, overcoming, purification by light, exit into immortality.”