Word: shostakovich
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...Orchestra until his emigration to the United States last year, has exuberance and knowhow with German, Estonian and Russian music. One looks forward to hearing how he fares with the Mozart or Haydn symphonies after this program of Brahms' Academic Festival Overture, Eduard Tubin's Tenth Symphony and Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony...
Tubin's Tenth, written in Stockholm in 1973, rollicks and lilts. It provides a smooth connection between Brahms' parody of German schoolboys' drinking songs and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, which, its composer wrote, captures the Russian alcoholic soul. Tubin, born in Kallaste, Estonia in 1905, moved to Sweden in 1944, after studying with Kodaly in Budapest and Heino Eller in Tartu. The symphony is in one big movement, and the melodies are folksy, recalling Bartok in rhythm and structure. Syncopation and dotted notes, along with the rolling figures in the strings, give the piece a gypsy personality. Just as enticing...
JARVI KNOWS HOW to conduct Shostakovich almost as well. The composer, who chafed under the policies of the Politburo up to his death in 1975, wrote in his memoirs--the unexpurgated edition--that "you have to be a complete oaf" unless you hear that his Fifth ends in "irreparable tragedy," not triumph. He does the reverse of Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Beethoven in their fifth symphonies; like them Shostakovich moves from minor to major key during the course of his symphony, but his finale nonetheless forebodes calamity...
Even more tragically, the concert notes--like most other concert notes and record jackets-- include an inappropriate description by Shostakovich of the finale...
Anyone with a penchant for genuine vodka will find the third sentence insipid. Shostakovich wrote the explanation after he composed the symphony in 1937, probably as an attempt to be restored to favor with Soviet officials after earlier compositions had been attached in Pravda. Unfortunately, most of Friday afternoon's audience, skewed as usual toward the elderly, probably took the composer at face value...