Word: shostakovich
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Throughout his remarkably productive career, Dmitry Shostakovich has produced two entirely different kinds of music: "decadent, bourgeois, neurotic'' works that stand in the first rank of contemporary composition, and ideologically pure, "democratic" works that stand almost nowhere at all. Ever since 1948, when he was chastised by the Central Committee of the Communist party for "decadence," Shostakovich's ideology has been improving and his music generally getting worse. Last week, disheveled and stoop-shouldered at 55, he made his way to the stage of the Moscow Conservatory to acknowledge the applause for his Twelfth Symphony, a numerical...
Never a Doubt. Shostakovich composed the Twelfth this past spring and summer in his dacha outside Moscow. He let it be known that the score would deal with the October Revolution and that it was "dedicated to the memory of Lenin." The music is divided into four parts: revolutionary Petrograd, Razliv (the place where Lenin went into hiding to avoid arrest by the provisional government), Aurora (after the cruiser that fired on the Winter Palace), and the finale. Dawn of Mankind. The symphony avoids the dark colors and heavy textures of traditional Russian orchestral music; it recalls far better works...
Angels & Demons. American readers can now sample Leskov's insight and variety in a new collection, generally well Englished by David Magarshack. The first story, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, is the Leskov work best known in this country because of the Shostakovich opera based on it (1934)-It is a quietly told story of an increasingly violent passion. The avalanche of sensuality starts when a bored wife has an affair with a young clerk on her old husband's household staff, and leads with chilling practicality to a murder, then to another and another...
Sergei Prokofiev was one of seven Soviet composers (among the others: Khachaturian and Shostakovich) denounced in 1948 "for formalistic and anti-democratic tendencies in music which are alien to the Soviet people." Confessing his "guilt," the great Russian composer promised to mend his Western ways in his next opera, which proved to be his last. Ten months later. The Story of a Real Man was submitted to the Composers' Union, was promptly banned as "anti-melodious" and still reeking with "the decay of bourgeois culture." Now, long after his official post-Stalin rehabilitation and seven years after his death...
...Shostakovich: Symphony No. 9 (London Symphony, under Sir Malcolm Sargent; Everest). A first stereo recording of one of the most ebullient, eccentric and delightful of Shostakovich's works. When the composer's orchestra-raucous, slapdash and happy-moves into battle, the effect is of a regiment under fluttering pennons posting to the attack...