Word: mzensk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...after Composer Piston's symphony had its première, a much more widely heralded piece of music was broadcast by the NBC Symphony under Conductor Artur Rodzinski: Russian Composer Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. Composer of the famed opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk and onetime white-haired boy of Soviet music, Shostakovich had lain for two years in official outer darkness, his opera banned and his Fourth Symphony confiscated because of "Leftist" modernistic tendencies (TIME, April 4). First of his works to be O. K.'d by Moscow critics since his downfall, the Fifth Symphony...
Most prominent victim of the Soviet ban was Dmitri Shostakovich, Soviet composer-laureate, whose tricky, sensational opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk, introduced to the U. S. in 1935 (TIME, Feb. 11, 1935), had become the rage of Manhattan's intellectuals. Lady Macbeth of Mzensk was withdrawn from Soviet theatres.* Composer Shostakovich's subsequent ballet, The Limpid Stream, was also withdrawn after a panning by Moscow critics, and his Fourth Symphony was suppressed without a performance. For two years Shostakovich was in the doghouse...
...Hoogstraten, Alexander Smallens, George King Raudenbush. The first week of the eight-week season was to feature Lily Pons singing three arias and Soprano Erica Darbo in an elaborate production of Strauss's Salome. Ambitiously the later repertoire included a telescoped Ring, a possible Lady Macbeth of Mzensk, ballets by Mikhail Mordkin's troupe and by the Littlefield troupe, now performing in Europe (TIME...
...most brilliant genius in the realm of operatic and symphonic composition. Not only has Comrade Shostakovich been Bol- shevism's musical darling, but Capitalism in Manhattan put on its boiled shirts and sped to the splendiferous Metropolitan Opera House premiere of his master work, Lady Macbeth of Mzensk (TIME, Feb.11, 1935). Pravda called Shostakovich's compositions "un-Soviet, unwholesome, cheap, eccentric and tuneless." The devastating Communist epithet "bourgeois" was tagged to them. Rehearsals of his latest ballet Limpid Stream, on which the Corps de Ballet of Moscow's great Bolshoi Theatre have been working diligently for months...
...most luridly erotic of all opera heroines has yet to appear on any opera stage. Beside her, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mzensk would seem a rural innocent (TIME, Feb. 11). The adulterous Marie in Alban Berg's Wozzeck is a colorless nobody compared with Alban Berg's Lulu, a symbol of insatiability conceived in the tortured mind of Playwright Frank Wedekind (Erdgeist, Die Büchse der Pandora). Sooner or later Lulu is bound to make her operatic appearance because of Composer Berg's reputation, the power of his music. Orchestral excerpts from Lulu have...