Word: shostakoviches
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Like most teenagers, Kissin is a romantic at heart, though his still rather narrow repertoire includes Mozart and Haydn as well as Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich. In Amsterdam last year he was scheduled to play the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1, even though the piece had by then become boring for him. The day before the performance brought the news that Andrei Sakharov had died. "That changed everything completely," he says. "I used to play the final movement with a lighthearted though sarcastic mood. After the news, it felt as though I had not performed the concerto in 10 years...
...first thing Mstislav Rostropovich did in Moscow last week was go to Novodevichy Cemetery. "To make my tears for my dearest friends," as he told one interviewer. The great cellist laid flowers on the grave of Dmitri Shostakovich, who once taught him composition (Rostropovich quit the Moscow Conservatory when Shostakovich was dismissed for having offended Stalin's sensibilities). He laid more at the graves of Sergei Prokofiev, David Oistrakh and Emil Gilels. The next day, at another cemetery, he paid his respects to his mother Sofia and to Andrei Sakharov, whom he called "the greatest man of the 20th century...
...stage, threw kisses in all directions and then raised his arms to begin. He had chosen a program full of sad messages: first Samuel Barber's elegiac Adagio for Strings; then Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony, which Rostropovich had performed at his last Moscow concert 16 years ago; then Shostakovich's anguished Fifth Symphony, written at the height of Stalin's purges in 1937. (In three subsequent concerts, two of them in Leningrad, Rostropovich would also perform the Prokofiev Fifth Symphony, the Dvorak Cello Concerto and Stephen Albert's Rivering Waters...
...point is debatable. Cowed by the official castigation of his 1930-32 masterpiece, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich never completed another opera, to the world's inestimable loss. Who knows what other great works went unwritten while Shostakovich was living a double life? "Tell the administration that you're working on the opera Karl Marx or The Young Guards, and they'll forgive you your quartet when it appears," he said. Moreover, at 157 minutes the film is itself guilty of some of Shostakovich's own sins, including bombast and repetitiveness...
Still, Testimony is a powerful drama, the tragedy of a man who had to betray himself in order to survive. "The filmmakers did not make a saint of Shostakovich," observes Volkov of the movie. "There are no saints in real life. He is shown as a man forced to compromise on minor things to save himself for more important things." It is a Faustian bargain few composers would like to face, even if they could write a lifetime of masterpieces in return...