Overture Magazine: 2017-2018 Season FINAL_BSO_Overture_May_June | Page 34

BERNSTEIN AND SHOSTAKOVICH
others’ fun by admitting that he should
be home in bed. This is a scherzo for
piano and percussion alone .… The party
ends in anticlimax and the dispersal of
the actors.…Thus a kind of separation of
the self from the guilt of escapist living
has been effected, and the protagonist is
free again to examine what is left beneath
the emptiness.
“The Epilogue. What is left, it turns out,
is faith. The trumpet intrudes its statement
of ‘something pure’ upon the dying pianino
[upright piano in the orchestra]; the strings
answer in a melancholy reminiscent of the
Prologue.…All at once, the strings accept
the situation in a sudden statement of the
newly recognized faith.…The way is open,
but at the conclusion, is still stretching long
before the [protagonist].”
Instrumentation: Two