Word: shostakoviches
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...program of last night's Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra concert showed the difference between musical bankruptcy and thematic economy. Shostakovich's Concerto for Violoncello deserves far less than it got (a very good performance from Pierre Fournier); it repeats monotonously to short themes that would have been cut even from a Hasty Pudding show...
...every time it is played. This time, I was particularly struck by the alternation between E major and E minor at the beginning of the second movement. The apparent indecision creates a delicious tension which is resolved into E major only when the oboe enters with its lyric solo. Shostakovich never tried such subtleties...
...playing the Shostakovich, Fournier never missed. Up high, his nearly faultless harmonics combined with the violins and bells to produce one of the delightful, but inconsequential, aural tricks in which the concerto abounded. His extended cadenza in the third movement lacked raw strength, but it was exquisite. Why he or conductor Henry Swoboda put their talents and the HRO's into this concerto is hard to understand...
...Incidentally, since the French horns are so often the objects of deserved criticism, to be just I must point out that last night, in the Shostakovich and in the Brahms, the horns were the best that I have heard in the HRO in two and a half years...
...generals and marshals who often appeared on TIME'S cover, many of their names-Budenny, Rokossovsky, Timoshenko, Voronov-now half-forgotten echoes of an era when the U.S. desperately tried to believe in the good faith of its Russian allies. There also were the artists, from Prokofiev and Shostakovich to Evgeny Evtushenko, always on the brink of political disgrace...