For those who love music and the place where music intersects with drama and dance, there’s real treat of a play which I hope is coming to London soon. The Gates of Kyiv is about so many things that a summary feels more than usually slight. But the short version is that this new work tells the many-layered story of the friendship between the great pianist, Maria Yudina, and the composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. It is written by Ian Kelly – a historical biographer as well as a playwright whose last play, Mr Foote’s Other Leg, starred Simon Russell Beale. The show has very different concerns and compass to Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus, but there’s a cousin invitation to understand and experience the life of the artists both as lived and as reflected upon by one of them – in this case Shostakovich. What drew me to the play in Windsor, though, was the promise of live music and the question of how to marry live classical repertoire to drama, without the one being deleterious to the other.
The story itself is fascinating. Yudina was an extraordinary woman and one of the truly brilliant pianists of her age. Born into a Jewish family in 1899, she converted to Russian Orthodoxy aged 20, and refused to conform to Soviet ideologies, remaining outspoken in her religious beliefs and defiant in the championing of the music she wished to perform, regardless of whether or not it had regime approval. Legends surround her. Those concerning the intensity and virtuosity of her performances. Those concerning the rich intellectual life of which she was part – besides Shostakovich, she was friends with the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin and poet Boris Pasternak. Those concerning her crippling poverty as her dissidence took its toll. And those concerning her fierce and recalcitrant relationship with Stalin himself – which the play imagines, confronts and enacts.
Shostakovich (1906-75), meanwhile, was the great composer for whom accommodation with the Stalin and the Soviet regime was forever distorting his work and asphyxiating his life. Indeed, so much of Shostakovich is occluded behind defensive postures and faux compliance. Some critics argue that Testimony, the book published in 1979 is exaggerated in its presentation of the composer as a great subversive who long regretted muting his resistance. Shostakovich’s music often feels as though it contains innumerable trap doors though which the listener must forever be falling – into dark and claustrophobic passages of self-criticism, subversion and despair.
The play re-imagines and fictionalises their lives. “The Gates of Kyiv is really about the tensions between creative people as one star rises and another does not,” Kelly explains, “as one is elevated and the other is destroyed by politics, patriarchy and being a pianist. Of course, we all have immense sympathy for Shostakovich – his life was lived in such atrocious artistic conditions with fellow artists being denounced, disappeared or purged all around him. But did he think of himself as a moral coward? We don’t know and yet despite – or because of – his many successes, he is undoubtedly an anguished figure.”
The balance of the two is finely achieved but, in the writing, Kelly found himself increasingly drawn to the antiphonal character of Maria: “Her religious journey, her courage, her unflinching certainty, the direct access she had to emotion and human spirit in her performances and her lifelong bravery. There’s something eternal in the struggle between necessary moral relativism and that adamantine moral certainty.”
Conflict is the first commandment of every drama. Some kind of none-straightforward love affair is usually the second. But The Gates of Kyiv is also interesting because it dramatises a human relationship that we very rarely see at the theatre: one that exists between lifelong not-lovers. “The itchiness between them fascinated me,” Kelly explains. “Another thing the play is about is what it is like to love a friend across a lifetime with difficult careers in the arts.” Kelly fictionalises the biographies in this direction because he is interested in the hidden Eros underlying an admiring-but-rivalrous friendship. “We don’t see these unspoken human relationships in drama all that often – about two people who love one another without straightforward resolution or rupture. And yet these relationships throng many lives.”
This story is rich and resonant, and for music lovers, an extra reason to see the show is its extraordinary playlist of live music. This is performed by Gala Chistiakova, a sublime pianist who has won over 30 piano competitions – from the Moscow International Frédéric Chopin, the Emil Gilels-memorial in Odesa to the Maria Callas GOP in Athens and the Buoni in Italy. And it is a real treat.
Chistiakova is on stage throughout. While Stockard Channing plays Yudina as friend of Shostakovich and antagonist of Stalin, Chistiakova is playing Yudina as pianist the same. And she plays sublimely: melding perfect articulation with great emotional poise and somehow leaning into the moments in the drama without traducing the music or reducing it to schmaltz or ephemera. Like Yudina herself, Chistiakova has a rare command and feel across different periods and composers, and the class of her recital adds an other dimension to the theatrical experience. She plays 30-odd pieces – Bach Preludes; Mozart Sonatas; Shostakovich’s Three Fantastic Dances and his Preludes in A-flat and D-minor; Tchaikovsky meditations; Saltykov’s transcription of Mozart Lacrimosa (from the Requiem); and, played at the end, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (Baba-Yaga and The Great Gate of Kyiv).
This melding of music, biography and drama is difficult to pull off. (Aside from Amadeus, think of all the terrible composer biopics on-screen.) But The Gate of Kyiv does so, and this is largely to do with the way Kelly worked with Christova. “I had the extraordinary resource of Gala’s great musicianship and knowledge,” Kelly says. “Everything musical was in discussion and rehearsal with her. It was such an honour. I wish I could always write like this. Of course, it was technical as well as artistic. In workshop and rehearsal, we were trying to see if each piece could reflect or refract the drama rather than drown it.”
Perhaps my favourite moment was the opening of the second half, when we hear Shostakovich’s D minor Prelude, the final piece in his 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87. This was composed in 1950-51 with Stalinism at its inhuman nadir, and the sound is so spare and dark and brooding, full of angular dissenting harmonies and departing contrasts. There’s so much sombre intensity. You look up on stage and there they are – the composer and the pianist and you can see it, and hear it, and feel it: the nightmare and the terror.
