Word: shostakoviches
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 5 (RCA). Soviet grandeur meets American dynamism in Leonard Slatkin's explosive reading...
...solid craftsmen whose music is informed by an eloquent melodic voice, and each is especially adept at writing for the symphony orchestra. Zwilich's First Symphony is a big, bold, brassy work, propelled by insistent, driving rhythms, while her Celebration is a rattling shout reminiscent at times of Shostakovich. Harbison's dark, looming Ulysses' Bow is the second section of a two-part Homeric ballet and displays well its composer's skill at orchestration. Although the ballet has yet to be staged, Ulysses' Bow, at least, can stand on its own as a vivid showpiece, a ten- movement suite...
...controlled with finger-tip accuracy. Ormandy's achievement was not only to preserve Stokowski's legacy but, in some ways, to surpass it. He was no mere caretaker. If he lacked Stokowski's restless adventurousness in presenting modern music, he nevertheless championed new works by his contemporaries Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich. If his scrupulously maintained low profile was the antithesis of Stokowski's flamboyant showmanship, he nevertheless insisted on a uniformly high performance standard, which can be heard on the hundreds of recordings he made with the Fabulous Philadelphians. Above all, Ormandy refined and deepened his orchestra's velvet tone...
Once in exile and facing the prospect of flagging vocal powers, Vishnevskaya, 58, turned to writing her autobiography with the same fevered intensity she invested in her operatic roles. These are no ghostwritten and-then-I-sang memoirs. Not since Dmitri Shostakovich's posthumously published confessional Testimony has a musician so convincingly portrayed a totalitarian state that spawns great artists, then despises the art they go on to produce...
...book's most affecting passages concern the tortured destiny of Shostakovich, whose servility to the Soviet authorities Vishnevskaya defends with the ferocity of friendship. She was not old enough in 1936 to understand the humiliation heaped on the composer when Stalin took exception to his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. But she was witness in 1965 to the drastic changes Shostakovich made in the score and libretto when a movie, renamed Katerina Izmailova, was made of his musical drama. Soviet censors lagged behind their American counterparts where sex was concerned. Vishnevskaya's account of the filming...