Word: shostakovich
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...controlled with finger-tip accuracy. Ormandy's achievement was not only to preserve Stokowski's legacy but, in some ways, to surpass it. He was no mere caretaker. If he lacked Stokowski's restless adventurousness in presenting modern music, he nevertheless championed new works by his contemporaries Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich. If his scrupulously maintained low profile was the antithesis of Stokowski's flamboyant showmanship, he nevertheless insisted on a uniformly high performance standard, which can be heard on the hundreds of recordings he made with the Fabulous Philadelphians. Above all, Ormandy refined and deepened his orchestra's velvet tone...
Once in exile and facing the prospect of flagging vocal powers, Vishnevskaya, 58, turned to writing her autobiography with the same fevered intensity she invested in her operatic roles. These are no ghostwritten and-then-I-sang memoirs. Not since Dmitri Shostakovich's posthumously published confessional Testimony has a musician so convincingly portrayed a totalitarian state that spawns great artists, then despises the art they go on to produce...
...book's most affecting passages concern the tortured destiny of Shostakovich, whose servility to the Soviet authorities Vishnevskaya defends with the ferocity of friendship. She was not old enough in 1936 to understand the humiliation heaped on the composer when Stalin took exception to his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. But she was witness in 1965 to the drastic changes Shostakovich made in the score and libretto when a movie, renamed Katerina Izmailova, was made of his musical drama. Soviet censors lagged behind their American counterparts where sex was concerned. Vishnevskaya's account of the filming...
...surreal, prehistoric kingdom of Shakespeare's Lear. The next shot shows Lear's huge, imposing castle which rises suddenly and rather unnaturally out of the ground, dwarfing the peasants who in comparison look like a bunch of ants swarming on an anthill. Heightened by the effective use of Dmitry Shostakovich's operatic score, the feeling of impending doom is made clear even before a word of the script has been said...
...tightly disciplined ensemble under the impressively gifted American conductor Leonard Slatkin, 38. Like the Chicago Symphony, which it resembles in style and flair, the St. Louis Symphony is at its best in big pieces, but of a more recent vintage: Rachmaninoff's orchestral music, Shostakovich and Prokofiev symphonies. Good as the orchestra is, its fortunes remain closely tied to Slatkin...