Word: shostakoviches
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...Other Soviet figures have sought artistic freedom in the West, but few could match the poignant symbolism of last week's defection drama. In a stunning rebuff to Kremlin cultural politics, the son and grandson of the Soviet Union's most celebrated contemporary composer the late Dmitri Shostakovich, decided to join Rostropovich in exile and petition the U.S. State Department for asylum...
...ultimate decision to defect was made while Orchestra Conductor Maxim Shostakovich, 42, and his son Dmitri, 19, a concert pianist, were on tour with the U.S.S.R. Television and Radio Symphony Orchestra in West Germany. Though Maxim Shostakovich seemed emotionally strained as he conducted a composition by his father, few if any in the audience the Bavarian city of Fürth suspected what was afoot. During a post-concert dinner party in a nearby Nuremberg hotel, the Shostakoviches eluded the Soviet functionaries guarding the exits and slipped away to the local police station. There Maxim announced their intention to stay...
News of the defection was received with dismayed silence in Moscow, where the name Shostakovich is revered. When an embittered posthumous volume of memoirs came out under the composer's name in the West in 1979, cultural bureaucrats sought to enlist his son in an effort to discredit the book and thus keep the official Shostakovich legend untarnished. Moscow acquaintances suggested that Maxim's frustration with his official role as keeper of his father's flame, and the increasing difficulty of obtaining visas for travel abroad, may have prompted him to take the step his troubled father...
Jarvi led a boring opening of the Shostakovich-- intended as a majestic dialogue for the orchestra. Joseph Silverstein, the concertmaster, bit his bow into the violin strings for no apparent reason, other than perhaps to impress the orchestra-seat audience with his bow technique. The horns, in contrast, played their statement of the main theme with little passion. Shostakovich's conceptions and Jarvi's interpretation began to shine, however, with the entrance of the harp's sustained chords. The composer glutted the music with fat harmonies and lines, which Jarvi wrings from the orchestra, at a cost; a wobbly beat...
Those who don't have an ear for music will be able to remember a line in the moderato of the Shostakovich that sounds just like the theme from Million Dollar Movie. The Tubin, similarly, contains rhapsodic, whistling tunes of the Bohemian life. And Gaudeamus Igitur--well, a trip to the Hasty Pudding might be just as good...