Word: shostakovich
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Venice's International Festival of Contemporary Music, which used to play host to such startling modern operas as Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress and Dmitry Shostakovich's The Lady Macbeth of Mzensk, last week unveiled a collaboration between two chilly and notably elegant talents: Britain's Composer Benjamin Britten and America's late, great Author Henry James. The work: Britten's opera version of The Turn of the Screw...
...along in the U.S. only. Among the loudly cheered highlights of the rally was a cabled tribute to Robeson from aging (65) Comedian Charlie Chaplin, now in self-exile in Switzerland. A day later, for his "extraordinary service" in behalf of the Kremlin, Chaplin, along with Soviet Composer Dmitry Shostakovich, was awarded a peace prize (value: about $14,000) by the Communist-sponsored World Peace Council. Charlie, who planned to carve up the swag among peace lovers in London, Geneva and Vienna, was "very pleased," but a friend of the family reported that Charlie's fourth wife, Oona...
...Shostakovich: Concerto in C Minor (Victor Aller, piano; Mannie Klein, trumpet; Concert Arts String Orchestra conducted by Felix Slatkin; Capitol). A barrel of fun, vintage 1933. It turns pretentious phrases into taradiddles, uncovers one ear-tickling twist after another, and includes a slow movement that is unfailingly melodious. Standout performance...
...early as 1936, Prokofiev was slapped on the wrist for composing in too "urbanized" a manner. He corrected this by drawing on popular subjects, and casting them in heroic molds, as he did in his huge score for the film Alexander Nevsky. But, along with six other composers, including Shostakovich and Khachaturian, he was in hot water again in 1948, when the Communist commissars complained that his music was too full of "formalism" -i.e., it was too tricky for the Soviet public to understand easily-and that he should compose with more "realism." And when he failed to correct...
...View. But Leeds has had its troubles. Last February, two U.S. companies released identical recordings by the National Philharmonic and Bolshoi Theater choruses and orchestras of Shostakovich's Song of the Forests: only one of them was Leeds-licensed. A few months later, two companies brought out Violinist David Oistrakh's expert performance of the Brahms Double Concerto...