Word: shostakoviches
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...Sentence. As the proceedings droned on, telegrams and letters arrived from the poet's prestigious friends -Composer Dmitry Shostakovich, Lenin Prizewinning Authors Samuel Marshak, Kornei Chukovsky and many others-protesting the absurdity of the trial. Such public boldness among artists took not only courage but conscience, but their protests were in vain. Brodsky was sentenced to five years of "useful labor." His job: carting manure at a camp near Archangel...
...SHOSTAKOVICH: QUARTETS 4 AND 8 (Mercury). Shostakovich's late chamber works are better than his late symphonies. The eighth quartet, a secular requiem for the victims of Fascism, was written in 1960 and is daringly monochromatic: three of the five movements are largo, and the often-repeated main theme changes only from a moan into a sigh. Even the joyful sections seem to shift into a remembrance of gaiety long past. A subtle performance by the Borodin String Quartet, which the U.S.S.R. will send on a first visit to the U.S. in October...
...harmless as a passing cloud-Gershwin, Sousa, Leroy Anderson. This follows the old axiom that serious music, like aged whisky, should be saved for cold winter nights.* But the music that Conductor Andre Kostelanetz chose to open the New York Philharmonic "Promenades" series last week had real substance-Shostakovich, Ravel, Alan Hovhaness...
...well, but the choreography failed to suggest much beyond a battle over a nightgown. The gown was worn by Eurydice (Dancer Cora Cahan) over flesh-colored tights and, as New York Daily News Critic Douglas Watt observed, it seemed Orpheus wanted it. (P.S.: He got it.) Excerpts from Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Ravel's Piano Concerto in G were deformed by the Philharmonic's raucous and jarring performance...
Alegrias and Shostakovich's Concerto could, happily, be forgotten in the second half of the program, when they were replaced by the Brahms. The Brahms would have been better if the orchestra had tuned before playing it, but it still justified Harvard's having its own symphony orchestra...