Word: shostakoviches
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...Prague's International Music Festival, music-loving Czechs got an impressive answer to a question they had been asking for a year: Whom will the Russians send? The answer came in a red-starred C-47 direct from Moscow: Russia had sent thin, 40-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich, one of the world's five greatest living composers...
...spite of his efforts to stay out of the limelight, shy Dmitri Shostakovich stole the show. One of the festival's big events was his Eighth Symphony, conducted by friend Eugene Mravinsky (to whom the Eighth is dedicated), conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic. When the Czech radio recently played the Eighth, the score was altered because it was considered too difficult to play; this time Mravinsky brought along his own score...
...Composer Shostakovich attended most of the festival's 38 concerts, but stood unobtrusively in the rear of the hall during rehearsals of his own works. In his free time, he browsed in Prague music stores for music-scores and records-bought new clothes, attended a supper party at the U.S. Embassy, where he ate a lot, drank little, showed a great liking for American cigarets...
...anyone who expected to hear new theories or techniques was disappointed. Blinking myopically under the klieg lights, he read a dull account of the bureaucratic organization of Soviet music, not once mentioning himself. At the end, someone asked: "Is your opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk banned in Russia?" Said Shostakovich quietly: "It is not banned-it is simply not played." There was an embarrassed silence; considering the blast directed at Lady Macbeth by Soviet ideologists eleven years ago ("Screaming, neurotic music"), it was hardly a nice question. Shostakovich made an abrupt bow and walked from the stage...
...Stravinsky. In halting English, which he has studied during the past year, Shostakovich confided to a U.S. newsman that of the new works he had heard he liked best Russian Expatriate Igor Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, and Swiss Composer Arthur Honegger's Third ("Liturgique") Symphony. He considers Stravinsky and Gershwin the best U.S. composers (he likes Porgy and Bess particularly because "it is expressive of a people"). What did he think of U.S. Composer Aaron Copland's Third Symphony, which he also heard for the first time? Said he: "I like his other works...