Word: shostakovich
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Simple, romantic, perfectly keyed to the new order in Russia, the Fifth Symphony restored Shostakovich to official favor...
...years later the Sixth Symphony brought him further official plaudits. Outside Russia, music lovers were more critical. Shostakovich's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies combined spontaneous gusto, originality and nobility, with a curious taste for trite themes and musical horseplay, as if the composer were constantly fighting down an impulse to throw musical custard pies...
Beer and Soccer. Today strangers who meet Shostakovich for the first time find him shy, serious, scholarly. At parties or among musicians, he unbends, jokes, out-drinks his companions. He likes automobiles, fast driving, U.S. magazines, reads the U.S. authors who most appeal to Russia-Mark Twain, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair. Strictly a city man, he dislikes dachas (Russia's summer bungalows), and komaryi (Russia's multitudinous mosquitoes...
Promptly a Pravda article called Shostakovich's music "un-Soviet, unwholesome, cheap, eccentric and leftist" (atonal). A few days after that, Pravda attacked his ballet, The Limpid Stream. Friends feared that Shostakovich's next composition might have to be called Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make. But Composer Shostakovich was not a revolutionist for nothing. He publicly agreed that Pravda knew more about music than he did. He withdrew his Fourth Symphony (it has never been performed) after one rehearsal. He announced that he would stake his musical future on a Fifth Symphony...
Before the German invasion, Shostakovich lived in a five-room Leningrad apartment filled with his family (wife, two children, mother, sister and sister's son) and piles of scores, books on music and sport. An enthusiastic soccer fan, Shostakovich is a regular correspondent of the chief Russian sports paper, Red Sport. Says...