Word: shostakoviches
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Prokofiev is the greatest musician today! Nobody else can write with such technical perfection, with such instrumentation. And all the time there is beautiful melody ! " Peter and the Wolves. Not all Boston's music-goers share Koussevitsky's enthusi asm for his fellow Russians - Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich - but they respect his judgment. Koussevitsky rates 39-year-old Shostakovich as a great-composer-to-be and 54-year-old Prokofiev as a great composer who has already arrived...
Prokofiev is not so well known in the U.S. for the kind of superpatriotic melodrama that characterized Shostakovich's Leningrad and May Day symphonies. But he has written his share. In 1939, as a birthday present to his boss, he wrote a piece called Homage to Stalin. He also did a Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, using words by Marx, Lenin and Stalin. Except for a Romeo and Juliet suite, nearly everything he has written in the U.S.S.R. has been built on Russian folk themes, and to glorify Russia's past and present...
...inherited from Conductor Leopold Stokowski. Now there was only one slightly bald head in the whole orchestra. There were twelve ex-servicemen. The orchestra thumped its way through Brahms's Second Symphony, which Brahms wrote at 44. But critics liked best young Conductor Bernstein's version of Shostakovich's First Symphony-which Shostakovich wrote...
...symphonist, Dmitri Shostakovich was now up to Beethoven-in quantity.* Last week his new Ninth Symphony was tried out in Moscow, in the manner the U.S.S.R. now decrees: at a private hearing of musicians...
...latest by Shostakovich, who is co-star of Soviet music with Serge Prokofieff, is a "Victory" symphony, to complete his war trilogy which began with the brassy, repetitious Seventh ("Leningrad"). It has an unorthodox five instead of four movements, but is shorter (25 minutes) than most symphonies. Shostakovich, who wrote it in ten weeks after three false starts, was afraid his frail little Ninth would not stand up against Beethoven's great Ninth ("a frightening responsibility") or the critics. "They'll say, 'We expected something grandiose from you and you are giving us a lark.' " Reported...