My pick for most awesome stream of the weekend? This double-bill from the Fisher Center at Bard College of knock-out mid-century symphonies by William Levi Dawson and Dmitri Shostakovich.
Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony” was first performed by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934. The composer extensively revised the piece after a trip to West Africa in 1952. Stokowski was the first to record it, but chances to experience it in concert have been few.
Shostakovich composed his Symphony No. 7, the “Leningrad,” as a display of hope and defiance during the Nazi siege of the city in 1941. The work was given its premiere in Moscow, by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra. It was next performed in the West, in London (by Henry Wood) and New York City (by Toscanini), after the score was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm, by way of Tehran!
The symphony was finally performed in Leningrad itself on August 9, 1942, with the concert blasted on loudspeakers into the enemy lines after three thousand high-caliber shells had been lobbed into the Germans. Furthermore, Shostakovich employed a grotesque quotation from Hitler’s favorite operetta, “The Merry Widow,” to mock the Nazi “invasion.”
The “Leningrad Symphony” enjoyed tremendous popularity during the war years, but in the decades since, its musical merits have tended to be overshadowed by its propagandistic origins.
This weekend’s concerts will be played by The Orchestra Now (TŌN) under the direction of Leon Botstein. The concerts will take place on Saturday evening at 8 pm and Sunday afternoon at 2 pm EDT.
Tickets are available in-house at the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. For those of us at home, the concert will stream free. Make your reservation here:
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