Posts Tagged ‘shostakovich’

Emerson String

Emerson String

Help with quote interpretation?

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus. By Emerson

Can anyone give me an easy interpretation of it?

It is a masterly quote describing how completely we view the world through our own eyes.
Our lives are made up of a long series of mood swings, seen through the coloured lens of our own personal interpretation. We reorganise the externals with regard only to what is of importance to us personally.

Emerson String Quartet: Shostakovich, String Qtet no. 3, III

Shostakovich Sym

Shostakovich Sym

why is Shostakovich so scary?

I'm listening to the 4th symphony; it's a beautiful composition but it's nearly 11 at night and i'm frightened by it!

it's like tiny bugs are crawling all over a creaky wooden floor, is the impression i'm getting from the music right now. do you ever get that feeling from music?

this one is also pretty "scary"

http://www.last.fm/music/Dmitri+Shostakovich/_/Chm+Sym+for+Strs%2C+Op.110a%3A+Allegro%3A+Attacca

As the two previous contributors have correctly said, Shostakovich lived in very scary times. He was only 11 at the time of the Russian Revolution and so lived his entire adult life under the oppressive Communist regimes of Lenin, Stalin (most scary of all), Khrushchov and Brezhnev. More than once Shostakovich was hauled over the coals for not conforming to Socialist ideals. The Fourth Symphony you have been listening to was written in 1936, yet it was pulled from rehearsals and not played publicly until 1961. It was written just after Shostakovich had been mercilessly mauled by the Soviet authorities for his opera 'A Lady Macbeth from Mtsensk' (one of his masterpieces) and he had been advised that to let the première of this daring and 'scary' work would land him in even bigger trouble. He waited until the comparitively lenient times of Khrushchov before allowing it to be performed. His First Violin Concerto and Tenth Symphonies similarly had delayed premières until after Stalin's death in 1953.

It is said on good authority that so frightened was Shostakovich that one day he would be arrested and sent to a labour camp that he kept a small packed suitcase under his bed at all times in case the KGB came knocking on the door in the middle of the night.

Shostakovich was very courageous, however, because he endelessly inserted hidden codes into his music which ridiculed the Soviet regime. Luckily for him, most of the party lackies were too stupid to recognise them.

No-one who has not lived in such awful circumstances can possibly imagine what it must have been like to exist and work in these circumstances. It is little wonder that so much of Shostakovich's music might be perceived as 'scary' by some.

Shostakovich Sym.11-4_1

Preludes Fugues

Preludes Fugues

Ten Of The Most Popular Classical Pieces Of All Time

For anyone studying popular classical music, it can be a daunting task to know where to begin. There are so many great pieces that a beginner can get overwhelmed. Here are 10 of the most popular classical pieces with a brief background of each. There are many others, of course, but these 10 are certainly among the most popular classical pieces of all time.

Clair de Lune is a piece by Claude Debussy, a French composer. It is the third and most popular movement of the larger Suite bergamasque. It is played pianissimo and is largely in D-flat major, with a shift to E major toward the end. Clair de Lune has been taught to students of popular classical piano for years and is prominently featured in movies and television shows.

Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14, popularly called the Moonlight Sonata, was completed in 1801. Beethoven had begun to suffer from hearing loss prior to this and used a special rod attached to the piano's soundboard in order to feel the vibrations and enhance his sense of the music. It was given the name Moonlight Sonata by a music critic who compared it to the moonlight shining on a lake.

Canon in D is the most well known piece by Johann Pachelbel. Originally written for three violins and basso continuo, it has since been given many different arrangements. Basso continuo refers to a group of instruments, one of which must be able to play chords. Other instruments must be able to play in the bass register, such as a cello. Canon in D is often played at weddings.

The Hallelujah Chorus is part of George Frideric Handel's Messiah. The text is from a libretto by Charles Jennens, who adapted parts of the Old and New Testaments for his composition. The Hallelujah Chorus is taken from the book of Revelation, and it is customary for audiences to stand during this movement of the Messiah.

George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue is a piece that combines the elements of popular classical music with the popular jazz music of the era. It was commissioned as a classical element in an all-jazz concert to be presented by band leader Paul Whiteman. Known as Al Capone's favorite song, Rhapsody in Blue has been featured in numerous films and advertisements.

The Piano Sonata in B minor is one of Franz Listz's most popular classical solo piano works. It is a piece in the Romantic style and consists of small movements woven into a larger whole. Thematic elements are presented in each movement, although the different setting of the movements make the elements sound differently each time. In one section the melody may seem violent, yet later in the piece it becomes something beautiful in a different context.

Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler contains many of the common elements of Mahler's work, such as the funeral march. Commentators have noted that when hearing Mahler's Fifth "you forget that time has passed." Scored for a large orchestra, the Fifth is considered to be Mahler's most conventional symphony up to that point in his career. He was regarded as a highly unconventional composer until the Fifth was published.

Johann Sebastian Bach composed The Well-Tempered Clavier to instruct students in solo piano playing. He collected 24 pieces and published them in 1722 as The Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1744 he published a similar collection with the title Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues. Combined, these two books comprise The Well-Tempered Clavier.

The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi consists of four violin concertos. A Baroque piece from 1723, The Four Seasons is also considered a series of tone poems, as Vivaldi provided instructions with each movement. Phrases such as "the drunkards have fallen asleep" and "the barking dog" give conductors instructions about the feel of each concerto in this popular classical piece.

Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C major, BWV 846, from Bach's Well-tempered Clavier, Gulda pianist

Shostakovich Symphony

Shostakovich Symphony

The Leningrad Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich – a Personal Interpretation

The Leningrad Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich – a personal interpretation

Symphony No.7 Op.60 Dmitri Shostakovich

Like much music of quality, the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Leningrad, is either loved or hated, rather than tolerated. It is famous, or infamous, depending on your point of view, for its first movement, a unique statement in the history of music, a movement lasting just under half of the symphony’s massive eighty minutes. It is also music, I believe, that is uniquely misunderstood, the popular interpretation being far too naïve an analysis of the motives of a composer as unpredictably and alternatively complex and trite as Shostakovich. So this is my personal version. First the description. I apologise if you already know the piece.

The piece opens with a confident, harmonically complex theme which seems to pass from one place to another, from one orchestral section to another like question, answer and analysis. It seems to portray life lived ordinarily, but tangibly celebrating the sophistication and tolerance of negotiated social contact. There is conflict here, but resolution is at hand through thought, interaction and experience. The music seems to offer a sense of life lived in the unending complexity of community.

But then the movement’s often derided second section begins. Over the “bolero-like” insistence of a repeated drum rhythm, an apparently innocuous, vaguely brainless, almost pop music joke theme strikes up, quietly at first, almost as if apologising for its own banality. The theme is repeated alongside an associated answering and balancing motif from the same mould. But it keeps getting louder and more assertive until eventually it transforms into a menacing presence that threatens violence. At its climax, the theme becomes a series of explosions which obviously refer to conflict and war. The complex theme of the opening returns to compete and the music fights out an exhausted resolution where the original sophisticated theme triumphs, but in an exhausted, empty way whilst the trite naivety of the drum rhythm reminds us that banality is not completely defeated.

The movement is often presented as entirely programmatic, as if it were film music. The complex themes at the start are the good people of Leningrad going about their daily lives, hence the sense of sophistication, an interpretation arising from a singularly patriotic interpretation of the work. The repeated intensity of the pop-like trivial tune is often described as the advancing German army. It begins quietly because it’s in the distance and gets louder as it approaches. On its arrival in Leningrad conflict is inevitable and, yes, the good people of Leningrad prevail, but achieve only an exhausted victory from which they can never recreate their original sophistication.

Now I have a problem with this view of the work, largely because, if it is accepted, the other movements make little sense. It is true that Shostakovich might have originally composed the first movement as a free-standing work and only added the other movements as an afterthought. It is also true that he himself summarised the symphony’s movements as War, Recollection, My Homeland and Victory, but I think that, as ever, the constraints that Stalinism placed on opinion rendered the composer more reticent than he might have chosen to be. I do think that the Leningrad’s first movement is programmatic, but I contend that its subject matter is ideology and that its intention could even be essentially propagandist, rather than patriotic. The fact that it does not believe its own propaganda, or indeed slants it in a way that might have caused displeasure to officialdom is the crucial element in my argument, because then the other three movements become nothing less than essential as attempts to answer the charges, to answer the questions.

Yes, the harmonic complexity of the opening theme must remain a depiction of the happy, sophisticated citizens of Leningrad going about their negotiated lives. But it’s a picture of the social interaction, an idealised socialism. It’s a portrait of what happy, democratised Soviets ought to be. The naïve repeated theme that follows is no German army, however. It is a musical depiction of the very concept of fascism. As with Nazism, itself, it begins small, almost unnoticed, its voice hardly heard. It is almost self-deprecatory in recognising the stupidity, the utter inanity of its own content, thus reflecting concepts such as nationalism, racism and other essential elements of such no-brain politics. But what can you do with a stupid message except repeat it? You can’t develop something that begins inane and stays that way. But you can repeat it and hope that it attracts the intellectually like-minded, the idiot, who will espouse its brainless simplicity because of the ease with which something without either content or rigour can be believed. And voices of support are added, slowly at first, but added nevertheless, and that’s why everything gets louder. And it doesn’t change because, having neither debate nor sophistication, it can’t change. It just asserts its own nonsense and inanity more forcefully. But now it is dangerous, largely because it has mobilised support amongst those who want to follow it blindly. So the repeated theme is the ideology of fascism and its triumph is the overbearing assertion of its own crassness. Its graduation to assertion beyond its own borders and thus to conflict is inevitable.

But in the end, of course, it fails, because once motivated the democratic, sophisticated, analytical ideology of the Soviet citizens of Leningrad will prevail. So the entire movement is an ideological conflict between fascism and Soviet socialism, with the latter, albeit exhausted, eventually victorious, despite the nagging continued presence of the former at the end of the movement. So that’s that. Or is it?

It is my suggestion that Dmitri Shostakovich did not believe this, at least on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s why we need the other three movements. The second is thematically related to the opening of the first, but the music is almost exhausted, bereft of the sophisticated energy of the beginning. Is this where we finished after the “war”, or in fact was it a different view of where we started – not so confident, not so sophisticated, just worn down? If so, then this movement is a different way of looking at the ideological propaganda of the first movement, for propaganda was what it was.

The third movement is again thematically related, but everything is slowed down. The sonorities are those of the Russian Orthodox Church in places. Its obvious nostalgia again harks back to a state and time where we idealised our past, but where that past might even have attained the ideal. We are separated from it now, and its utopia can only be imagined or perhaps worshipped.

The fourth movement now becomes the ideological key to the entire work. Yes, it is triumphant. Yes, it asserts and reaffirms an ultimate victory, but its climaxes are grand rather than heartfelt. It finds its expression via the musical platitudes that Shostakovich made his hallmark. So, yes, we have prevailed. Yes, we have also won. We have defeated the ideology of fascism manifest as enemy, as depicted in the propaganda of the first movement. But what we have achieved is neither the sophistication we claimed at the outset nor its idealised memory from some imagined past. The opening theme is there at the end, but it has lost all confidence in itself. There is a hollowness about the success, a questioning about which side of the overall ideological conflict actually prevailed. So when the great patriotic symphony that in some estimations celebrates victory in the Great Patriotic War ends triumphantly, it is not just exhausted but also disillusioned because the naivety of the outcome bears considerable resemblance to what we originally opposed. Now that’s sophisticated.

Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5,Bernstein

Shostakovich Piano

Shostakovich Piano

Paxos - The Holiday Island For Music Lovers.

The tiny Greek island of Paxos, with its groves of olive trees, secluded beaches and coves, and pretty coastal villages, has become a favourite destination for music lovers during its annual jazz and classical music festivals.

In June, the Paxos Jazz Festival attracts talented and well-known musicians from far and wide to perform in open-air, idyllic locations with perfect summer weather. And from 2-13 September 2006 the renowned Paxos International Music Festival features classical music concerts in Loggos.

Since 1986, this Festival has established a tradition of excellence in performance, and has developed a loyal following of visitors and locals. As well as presenting major works from the chamber music repertoire, the Festival has commissioned new pieces especially for the Island. These included We Shall be Here, for a thousand and a thousand more years, a cantata tracing the history of Paxos from its mythological beginnings to the present day and Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf translated into Greek. Now directed by the UK's Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the 2006 Festival will present major works by composers who have anniversaries this year, including Mozart's Clarinet Quintet; Schumann's Piano Quintet; a Bartok String Quartet and a Shostakovich piano trio. And Guildhall students and teachers will give five special concerts. For the first time in Paxos, singers will present a repertoire of songs and arias.

The cosmopolitan capital of the Island, Gaios, bustles with life at festival time and its harbour is packed with yachts and cruisers. Cafe bars and restaurants line the waterfront, nestled between charming villas with their Venetian architecture, and the island's nightlife includes late-night music bars overlooking the harbour. At the waterfront terrace of Bar Taxidi, in picture-postcard Loggos, you might even find Spiros, the owner, making traditional music.

Some of the best accommodation on Paxos is to be found in the lovely little fishing harbour of Loggos but, be warned, with limited accommodation Paxos villas are in high demand at the time of the music festival so be sure to make your booking way in advance.

Shostakovich:Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major, Op. 102 II. An