Word: shostakoviches
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...Shostakovich: Symphony No. 10 (Leningrad Philharmonic conducted by Eugene Mravinsky on Concert Hall; New York Philharmonic-Symphony conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos on Columbia). The latest symphony by Russia's Dmitry Shostakovich performed by the orchestras that gave the work its world and U.S. premieres respectively. The Americans, for all their dazzling virtuosity, sound less Russian than the Russians, but both recordings make the work sound stronger and more cohesive than it does in concert...
...music the writers were talking about was a long (50 minutes), restless work full of pretty little melodies. Perhaps in deference to the short concentration span of his audiences, the composer allowed no single idea to develop very long. As of old, Shostakovich showed his ability to stir up a storm of violence, with the brasses braying, the drums thundering, the winds shrieking and the strings pacing along...
...York Philharmonic-Symphony gave the first American performance of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony last week and got a divided press. "Obviously the strongest and greatest symphony that Shostakovich has yet produced," cheered the New York Times's Olin Downes. "Sprawling, noisy, lacking in coherent style and even culture," complained the Herald Tribune's new critic, Paul Henry Lang. SHOSTAKOVICH GOOFS, headlined the slangy Daily News...
...Dmitry Shostakovich has been up and down the ladder of official Soviet approval. In 1936 his opera-Lady Macbeth of Mzensk was considered "neurotic" (its heroine committed murder out of boredom rather than in the interests of social progress) and was banished from Moscow. During the war his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies were, in effect, official Soviet masterpieces, although non-Soviet ears found them pretty thin stuff. But the Ninth got him into hot water with the party's Central Committee in 1948 (it "smelled strongly of the spirit of modern bourgeois music...
Chief criticism: the symphony was "profoundly tragic," an artistic attitude considered antithetic to Soviet society, especially if the music depicted a lonely individual. But an answering article got Shostakovich off the hook by inventing a dialectically dazzling new term. The composer, who had dedicated his work to world peace had, it appeared, really written an "optimistic tragedy." Or, as the slogan had it in Orwell's 1984, "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery...