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Photo: New Zealand School of Music
Shostakovich’s 5th symphony helped keep him out of jail. It also helped Estella Wallace into composing.
Next week, the New Zealand String Quartet will premier Wallace’s latest – and prize winning – work, which was inspired by another Shostakovich masterpiece: his viola sonata.
The performance is reward for winning the 2025 Finlayson composing prize with “Of Sorrows”. She was only too happy to take on the challenge set by the prize’s administrators, SOUNZ and the New Zealand School of Music: to write a new work in response to Shostakovich’s viola sonata, which was his last composition.
A deeply personal work, Shostakovich knew he likely didn’t have long to live when he created it. A stroke had already paralysed one side of his body, so he learnt to write with his other hand so he could keep composing.
Wallace’s piece will be part of a chamber music concert, Shostakovich: Unpacked, marking 50 years since his death in 1975.
Dimitri; composing could be a dangerous job.
Photo: Creative Commons
Speaking to RNZ Concert host Bryan Crump, Wallace says she discovered Shostakovich as a Year 13 student through her high school music teacher, Michael Langdon.
“We were studying his 5th Symphony, and the political climate of the time especially around Lady Macbeth [Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk] and having to put aside Symphony Number 4, and I just found his life story so heartbreaking and his 5th Symphony so incredible, and it made me want to listen to his music more.”
Wallace was also moved by the twists of fate that kept Shostakovich out of a Soviet prison; how the person sent to arrest him got arrested instead before he could pay the composer a visit.
As it turned out, Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony, premiered in 1937, revived the composer’s standing with the Soviet authorities.
Maybe it even saved his life, which was to last the best part of four more decades.
For her work “Of Sorrows”, Wallace says while she was deeply moved by Shostakovich’s viola sonata, she tried not to imitate it.
She does, however, quote Shostakovich’s own musical motive: D.S.C.H. The German letters for the notes D, E-flat, C and B, which also happen to spell out the composer’s initials, and which he used throughout his composing career.
Ahead of its premiere, RNZ Concert asked Wallace if she’s nervous about how it will go down with the public.
Not really. If she feels she’s got her music right, she’s pretty confident some of the billions of people out there will like it.
As for her next project, Wallace says basically she’s composing all the time. That’s when she’s not throwing herself into some of her other passions, like playing cricket (she’s a fast bowler).
Luckily for her, summer is just around the corner.
Meanwhile, “Of Sorrows” gets its world premiere at the Nelson Centre of Musical Arts in a concert that’s part of Nelson Arts Festival on Tuesday 28 October.
Also on the bill, Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor and that Sonata for Viola, which inspired Wallace to write “Of Sorrows” in the first place.