Word: shostakovich
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Triumph & Tension. A more impressive contribution to the Met's new season came later in the week with a Boris Godunov, orchestrated by Dmitry Shostakovich. In its 75-year history, Mussorgsky's roughhewn but powerfully felt work ("I lived on Boris and in Boris," the composer once said) has appeared in several versions, including two by the composer himself and two schmalzier ones by his friend Rimsky-Korsakov. This season the Met decided to try the version scored by Shostakovich in 1940 but never before presented on the U.S. stage. The result is a brassy, full-throated Boris...
...match the flogging power of the Shostakovich orchestration, a first-rate cast was called for, and the Met supplied it: Giorgio Tozzi, Ezio Flagello, Norman Kelley, Kim Borg, Blanche Thebom. The immense chorus sang the English text (by John Gutman) with both volume and admirable clarity. But the clear triumph of the evening belonged to Baritone George London in the title role. His Boris, which he sang with great success during his recent tour of Russia, was passionate, anguished, suffused with an almost unbearable sense of racking inner tensions. As London played it last week, it clearly belonged among...
There seems to be no easier method of praising an aspect of the "enemy" culture than to note that the book, play, or symphony under discussion is "above politics." And thus we have heard that the artistry of Wagner, Furtwangler, Prokofiev, or Shostakovich is above politics, even though we know how deeply the work of these men was influenced by their political environments...
Exuberant & Witty. Performed by Russia's eminent cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, and the visiting Leningrad Symphony Orchestra, the 28-minute concerto emerged as a work of compelling rhythms, long, curving lyric lines, exuberantly witty folklike figurations. Although its technical demands were tremendous ("If Shostakovich had written two more bars for the cadenza," said Rostropovich, "I could not have played them"), the acrobatics were not merely contrived, as has been true of so much of Shostakovich's recent work, notably his vapid, bombastic Eleventh Symphony. The concerto, wrote the Sunday Times, presented "a real conflict and a final solution...
...Shostakovich's popular triumph was matched by that of Cellist Rostropovich, whose virtuosity and richly burnished tone invoked comparisons with Casals. As for the 106-member Leningrad orchestra, it was the hit of London, which has no first-rate symphony of its own. The oldest orchestra in Russia, it is also Russia's best. Under Conductor Eugene Mravinsky, 57, the orchestra plays a generous number of modern works by composers like Hindemith, Stravinsky, Britten, Copland. In London it played mostly Russian works-although it learned Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra...