Dmitri? DMITRI! Pull yourself together. Don’t look so miserable.

This week on “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll be featuring your Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor. Sure, it’s dedicated to Ivan Sollertinsky, a close friend of yours who died an untimely death, and it was given its premiere in Leningrad in 1944, not the cheeriest place in the months following a years-long siege that killed probably a million and a half people, maybe two, created subhuman conditions, and instilled unfathomable desperation in the populace.

This is the piece that lent your String Quartet No. 8 its inexorable, klezmer-influenced “danse macabre.” After all, among Sollertinsky’s many other talents and enthusiasms – as a musicologist, a critic, a linguist, a professor, and the artistic director of the Leningrad Philharmonic – he was an ardent enthusiast of the music of Gustav Mahler. Sollertinsky had been evacuated during the siege. Unfortunately, he died suddenly of a heart attack in Siberia at the age of 41.

With Sollertinsky’s death, the barricades of misery were shattered, and you mourned as only you could. It’s not exactly uplifting music, but boy does it make an impression.

We’ll hear it performed at the 2011 Marlboro Music Festival by pianist Bruno Canino, violinist Ying Fu, and cellist Matthew Zalkind.

Then Alexander Glazunov – representative of an earlier generation, oblivious, and perhaps not entirely sober – will clear the air with his String Quintet in A major. Glazunov knew you well, did he not? As director of the Petrograd Conservatory, he saw to it that you were allowed to bypass preparatory theoretical courses and enter directly into the conservatory’s composition program.

What a nice guy! Too bad you were lukewarm on his music. But you did have kind things to say about the man, and even opined that his scherzos weren’t too bad.

Glazunov’s quintet is full of serene lyricism, generously melodic and quite beautiful. Then again, Glazunov never had to worry about Nazis and probably never had to eat anyone to survive. We’ll hear it performed at Marlboro in 1982, with violinists Sylvie Gazeau and Ernestine Schor, violist Toby Hoffman, and one-and-future cellists of the Guarneri Quartet, David Soyer and Peter Wiley.

That’s a dazed piano trio, with a glaze of Glazunov, on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

RAINY DAY ACTIVITY: Post your most miserable photo of Shostakovich in the comments section below.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

PHOTOS: Sollertinsky (upper left) and the many moods of Shostakovich