Word: shostakovich
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Like most Russian composers-and unlike his fellows in capitalist countries-Dmitri Shostakovich works for a corporation. Its headquarters are a modern redbrick combination office and apartment house just off Gorki Street in the center of Moscow. It is known as the Union of Soviet Composers, abbreviated to Musfund. Its board of directors are Russia's biggest musical bigwigs, some of them composers of distinction. When Musfund wants a symphony written, it gets a composer, sets a deadline (usually about a year away), gives an advance. A good job earns fat sums. The corporation also lends the composer...
Last week the Union of Soviet Composers held a convention. Before an audience of fellow musicians, spare, bespectacled Dmitri Shostakovich read a learned report, "On the Creative Tasks of Soviet Composers during Days of Patriotic War." One task Shostakovich had carried out more successfully than any of his colleagues: selling Musfund's music to the U.S. While the Moscow convention was in progress, one of Musfund's best customers, the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, was preparing the U.S. premiere of Shostakovich's latest work-his Eighth Symphony. The orchestra's broadcaster, the Columbia Broadcasting System...
...large radio public agreed with the Carnegie Hall audience that CBS had not been gypped. The symphony rolled out on the U.S. air waves, streamlined and spectacular. It had all the usual Shostakovich features, including special, de luxe, noncollapsible climaxes, probably the most efficient roof-raisers of their type known to the trade. Conductor Artur Rodzinski put it through its power-dives with a veteran test pilot's skill. At times the orchestra glittered with satire; at others it seemed to strum itself like a giant balalaika...
During the ensuing concert I wandered through the various rooms greeting old friends-mostly waiters recruited from the Metropole. Sitting stiffly, but beautiful in tails, on a wooden bench near the coatracks were Dmitri Shostakovich and his wife. His sensitive poet's face looked bored. They said that they hoped to go to the U.S. after...
...Heldenleben, a circus parade and a Czechoslovakian weenie-roast. It was vulgar, raucous, unabashedly sentimental, as enjoyable as a baseball game or a day at Coney Island. Critics were unable to down the suspicion that Composer Antheil had paid careful attention to the music and success of Dmitri Shostakovich. In any event, the work proved what some of his friends have long suspected: that the talent Antheil has hid under a bushel of estheticism is one of the most robust and various in modern music...