Word: shostakovich
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Last winter, as he listened to the roar of German artillery and watched the sputtering of German incendiaries from the roof of Leningrad's Conservatory of Music, Fire Warden Shostakovich snapped: "Here the muses speak together with the guns...
...year eleven in the life of a pale, slight, impressionable little bourgeois boy who clung to a servant's hand in the battle-littered streets of Petrograd. Said the servant: "This is the revolution, Mitya." Young Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich only stared and clutched the servant's apron. But what he saw and heard he pondered in his precocious head. Once safe at home, he sat down and composed two pieces: Hymn to Liberty and Funeral March to the Victims of the Revolution. A prodigy and a prodigious event...
...many war-weary months the people of Leningrad have known solemn, youthful Dmitri Shostakovich as a fire fighter, a trench digger, an embattled citizen like themselves. But the rest of the world has continued to think of him as the only living composer, aside from Finland's Jean Sibelius, who can make musical history by writing a new symphony. Last week musical history was again on the make. In Kuibyshev, secondary Soviet capital, the orchestra of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater began rehearsals on Shostakovich's long-heralded Symphony No. 7. Composer Shostakovich has dedicated his symphony...
...Dmitri Shostakovich started making himself understood in 1926, when, in contrast to much modern music that sounded merely disillusioned, cynical and ugly, young Shostakovich's First Symphony spoke up brightly with gusty tunes and youthful zest. This month, phonograph record shops all over the U.S. put on display two outstanding albums of the premier Russian musician: his Symphony No. 6 (Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski; Victor; 9 sides); his Piano Quintet (Vivian Rivkin and Stuyvesant String Quartet; Columbia; 8 sides...
...Quintet, which harks back to 18th-Century simplicity, was shrewdly judged so good by Soviet officials that in March 1941 they awarded Shostakovich a Stalin prize of 100,000 rubles for it (about 19,000 U.S. dollars), the biggest coin ever paid for a piece of chamber music...