Word: shostakoviches
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Battle Royal. Before the first strip of film had gone into the enlarger, three topflight U.S. conductors, all Shostakovich champions-sleek, platinum-haired Leopold Stokowski, the Cleveland Orchestra's Artur Rodzinski, Boston's Serge Koussevitzky-were locked in a polite battle royal for the glory of conducting the premi...
This Sunday, a special NBC Symphony broadcast (4:15 to 6 p.m. E.W.T.) will give the Western Hemisphere its first chance to hear what Shostakovich's Marxist muse, now 25 years older, has to say in his Seventh Symphony,* his biggest, most ambitious orchestral work to date-the work that he wrote last year between tours of duty digging trenches in the outskirts of Leningrad and fire-watching on the roof of the Conservatory...
...conductor. Both Toscanini and Stokowski are under contract to NBC next winter, but next winter is a long way off. Maestro Toscanini might conduct the musical scoop this summer, if he liked the score. (But four years ago he had been offered the first performance of Shostakovich's Fifth, and declined.) So the photostat pages of the score were rushed to Toscanini, and NBC held its breath. He looked, said: "Very interesting and most effective." He looked again, said: "Magnificent...
...Symphony. Written for a mammoth orchestra, Shostakovich's Seventh, though it is no blatant battle piece, is a musical interpretation of Russia at war. In the strict sense, it is less a symphony than a symphonic suite. Like a great wounded snake, dragging its slow length, it uncoils for 80 minutes from the orchestra. There is little development of its bold, bald, foursquare themes. There is no effort to reduce the symphony's loose, sometimes skeletal structures to the epic compression and economy of the classic symphony...
...this very musical amorphousness is expressive of the amorphous mass of Russia at war. Its themes are exultations, agonies. Death and suffering haunt it. But amid bombs bursting in Leningrad Shostakovich had also heard the chords of victory. In the symphony's last movement the triumphant brasses prophesy what Shostakovich describes as the "victory of light over darkness, of humanity over barbarism...