Word: shostakovich
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Stalin called his work "noise, not music." Pravda once sneered that it "reeks of the bourgeois." Now the sour notes have died away, and there he was in the Moscow Conservatory, shy, bespectacled and frail as ever, answering cheers at a concert celebrating his 60th birthday. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich received another gift too: the Soviet title of Hero of Socialist Labor. Best of all was the successful first Moscow performance of his new piece, Cello Concerto No. 2, conducted by a similarly slight, bespectacled musician: Dmitri's 28-year-old son Maxim...
...Shostakovich's score swells at all the wrong places. When Hamlet confronts Ophelia "mad," there is a chance for some very sinister stuff: a glaze-eyed Aryan appears, bearing down on her. But up jumps a nervous little Dragnet theme to turn it ludicrous. When Hamlet asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "Am I easier to fret than a pipe?" the scene is played in heavy silence that exaggerates its portent. But presumbaly that's the director's doing, as, unfortunately, is a lot else...
With his reputation burgeoning, Handy has now become the subject of the jazz aficionados' favorite diversion: endless treatises delving into his musical roots. The pedants find meaningful traces of Bartok and Shostakovich, of rhythm and blues and bebop, of African rhythms and Indian ragas, of Saxophonist Benny Carter (in the upper register) and of Clarinetist George Baquet (in the trills). John Handy hears differently. "More and more," says he, "I sound like John Handy...
...even suggested that gold lettering be banned as crassly "capitalist." Henceforth, they ordered, all signs, inscriptions and customarily white traffic-cop batons must be rendered in red. All books not reflecting Mao-think should be burned; recordings of works by such "feudal-bourgeois-revisionist" composers as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky must be banned. Also on the condemned list: taxicabs, toy wristwatches, sunglasses-and even happiness. A Mukden candy shop was ordered to drop the word happiness from its name, in keeping with the new austerity...
...Horse. Kates, the son and grandson of professional string musicians and a student of Gregor Piatigorsky, played the Shostakovich Cello Concerto, with which he had stirred the Moscow judges and audience in June. ("Viennese refinements were out-they wanted guts, they wanted the roof to come down," he said.) Hunching his lanky frame over the cello, Kates boldly carved out the jagged, pulsating lines of the piece with a firm tone and a left hand that skipped deftly through the most prickly technical snares. The roof came down...