Word: shostakoviches
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...FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). The life and music of Composer Dmitri Shostakovich are presented in still photographs and recent documentary footage in this Soviet-produced film...
...championed, I have never heard him utter these words; I have only read them and they have always irritated me. He has never clarified this spurious statement, has himself composed in this form. His repeated performances of my symphonies, the symphonies of Copland, Schuman, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and many others are sufficient evidence that he is quite wrong. Bernstein's statement is paradoxical, but as long as he himself composes in the symphonic form, he gives himself the lie. Long live Leonard Bernstein and long live the Symphony...
...most recent major work of Russia's foremost composer, Dmitry Shostakovich, is the Violin Concerto No. 2 (1967). Soviet Virtuoso David Oistrakh has already performed it in a few cities in the U.S. and Europe, but most Westerners have not heard...
Last week the first recording of the concerto was issued on the Melodyia Angel label. The music should prove as much of a surprise to Shostakovich's fans as to his critics. Gone are the characteristic hard-edged rhythms, brittle orchestral sounds and prankish grotesqueries. Instead, the bad boy of Russian music seems to have found a new mood of lyrical quiet and contentment. His artistic debt to Sergei Prokofiev is as clear as ever-embarrassingly so at times-and some of his melodic writing in the first movement is downright dull. But the elegiac sweep of the middle...
Nevertheless, Khachaturian professes an interest in new music; several of his pupils at the Moscow Conservatory are, he says, "very modern." Their teacher's own prevailing conservatism has produced its own rewards: an eight-room apartment in Moscow (in a building where Shostakovich, Rostropovich and several other Soviet musicians also live), a summer home, another estate presented to him by the Armenian government, two cars, two chauffeurs and a large staff of servants. "I suppose that makes me a capitalist," he says, not at all ruefully...