Word: shostakoviches
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Whenever Joseph Stalin saw an opera that wasn't Eugene Onegin he went home mad, but rarely as mad as he was the night he saw Dmitry Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. "Gnashing and screeching, crude, primitive, vulgar," Pravda roared, having prudently reconsidered a published opinion that called the opera "a triumph" after its 1934 debut two years before. Shostakovich withdrew the opera, and off and on over the years, he set to work at revision...
...Shostakovich: Symphony No. 4 (Philadelphia Orchestra; Columbia) was rehabilitated in 1961 after 25 years of official scorn in Russia; Shostakovich meekly labeled his next symphony "A Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism." Now, in its first American recording, the Fourth is worth hearing mainly to find out what all the fuss was about. Whatever its polemic content may be, it sounds clumsily Mahlerian and full of papier-maché grandeur...
Nielsen: Symphony No. 5 (New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, conductor; Columbia) is an excited reading of the seldom-heard work of the late Danish composer Carl Nielsen. Nielsen's melodious, strongly rhythmed music sounds like a primer to Shostakovich, and Bernstein makes the most of all its frenzied drama. It is, above all, a showcase for the Philharmonic's superb percussionists...
...abroad until they "mature politically." When a West German girl was detained at the Soviet border on charges of smuggling caviar, Izvestia brought Evtushenko into it by charging that she had met Evtushenko in Germany and from him had learned all about "fashionable Moscow youth." In Minsk, where Dmitry Shostakovich's new 13th Symphony was performed for the first time outside Moscow, a critic castigated the composer for basing part of his score on Evtushenko's famed poem. Babi Yar, a savage indictment of Soviet anti-Semitism that the literary commissars have already made Evtushenko revise...
...fiddle player to the Premier. Then both removed their shoes and jackets and went upsy-daisy to discuss the esoteric art of yoga. It was peppery Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion, 76, paying a courtesy call on Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, 46, after Menuhin's performance of a Shostakovich-concerto at a kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee. What one man didn't know about music, the other didn't know about politics, but they got along fine. Yoga, confided Menuhin, is the best treatment for his slipped disc, and Ben - Gurion, coming head-over -heels again, told...