Word: shostakoviches
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Poor Dmitry-it seemed about time to give up on him. The great Shostakovich, whose First and Fifth symphonies had alerted the world to the genius of Russia's "20th century Beethoven." had for years been a musical bureaucrat, cranking out empty banalities in the name of "people's music''-a pathetic Pshawstakovich...
Even the social realist critics he had tried so hard to please ever since Stalin had scolded him for bourgeois tendencies had shown little patience with the bombastic Leninism of his Eleventh and Twelfth revolutionary symphonies. Mocking rumor had it that in his dacha outside Moscow, Shostakovich would next write a Sputnik symphony, and after that, a Soviet soccer symphony...
...neck with the brisk air of an English nanny determined to have no scenes in the nursery." Even so, the Leningrad's carefully detailed exposition of the Symphony moved a crowd in Washington's Constitution Hall to a standing ovation last week; its performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 12 was also a success. In that work the orchestra was precise, scrupulously attentive to detail but charged with an enormous vitality...
...requiems of Mozart and Verdi, but I do not take it as religious music-I take it as secular music." Asked how he now feels about his opera, A Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which was denounced by Pravda in 1936 (reportedly because Stalin did not like it), Shostakovich revealed that he was rewriting it: "I did not like the old version; in vocal parts I abused high and low registers. This has been corrected...
...Shostakovich said that he was an admirer of the earlier works of that old Russian revolutionary Igor Stravinsky, who will visit Moscow this month: "I like his Petrouchka, Rite of Spring, the symphonies, and all the ballets except the last. His latest works do not seem to belong to him." As for his own works in progress, to which Shostakovich would they belong? The composer gave a hint when he announced that he is about to begin his 14th Symphony (the 13th is all but complete). It will be dedicated to Soviet achievements in space...