For whatever reason (i.e. I sent in the wrong show), my New Year’s program aired on “Sweetness and Light” a few weeks ago. Aside from having eggnog on my face, no harm done, I suppose, although I’m sure listeners were wondering why I was going all Guy Lombardo three weeks before Christmas.
Since it’s already recorded, and because it’s the holidays, and because I’m lazy, I’m putting the kettle on to boil some more water for a festive tea party. The playlist will include Dmitri Shostakovich’s charming arrangement of “Tea for Two,” Samuel Barber’s “Souvenirs,” his musical evocation of the elegant Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel in days of yore, and Richard Strauss’ hallucinatory dancing tea leaves from the high-calorie ballet “Schlagobers,” or “Whipped Cream.”
The show will achieve its nutty apotheosis when sugar and caffeine intersect with the hypnotic patter of the 1953 novelty song “The Little Red Monkey,” which tells of a simmering simian’s reactions to violin, euphonium, and tea.
Your eyes will pinwheel, your brain will hum, and your heart will go pitter-pat when you join me for a bottomless cuppa on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EST/8:00 PST, exclusively on KWAX Classical Oregon!
Stream it wherever you are at the link:
https://kwax.uoregon.edu/
Tag: Dmitri Shostakovich
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Take 2 Holiday Tea Party on “Sweetness and Light”
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Bernstein Salutes Shostakovich in Moscow
On Dmitri Shostakovich’s birthday, here’s a wonderful document of Leonard Bernstein saluting the composer in Moscow in 1959, prior to a performance of the “Leningrad Symphony.” A modest man accustomed to stepping very carefully in a totalitarian state (also, he didn’t speak English), Shostakovich isn’t quite sure how to react, but ultimately approaches the stage to shake Bernstein’s hand. Stick around for the end of the video as Bernstein speaks the truth, and lament afresh those who devote their lives to undermining our potential as a species.
Shostakovich composed the symphony, his seventh, as an emblem of hope and defiance during the Nazi siege of Leningrad 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 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.
One of Bernstein’s most shattering recordings of his later years was of this very work, taken from a live performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1988 and issued on the Deutsche Grammophon label. The recording was recognized with a Grammy Award in 1990 – the year of Bernstein’s death at 72 – for Best Orchestral Performance. Shostakovich died in 1975 at the age of 68.
In 1966, Bernstein paid tribute to Shostakovich for the composer’s 60th birthday, with another characteristically insightful introduction, for one of his televised “Young People’s Concerts,” which again featured a selection from the “Leningrad Symphony” and the complete Symphony No. 9.
Happy birthday, Bernstein-style, Dmitri Shostakovich!
PHOTO: Same tour, different concert: Shostakovich and Bernstein share an ovation after a performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on August 22, 1959
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Shostakovich Plays Shostakovich 50th Anniversary
This week on “The Lost Chord,” on the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, we’ll revisit two documents from a collection released on the Melodiya label, “Shostakovich Plays Shostakovich.” These are riveting, not only for the musicianship they enshrine, but also on account of their biographical fascination and their sense of history.
Dmitri Shostakovich was a fabulous pianist, who, early on, eked out a living with his improvisations at a local cinema. He began serious studies at the age of 9, and continued, formally, at the Petrograd Conservatory, upon his acceptance there, at the age of 13. Once he began to receive international attention for his original compositions, for works such as his Symphony No. 1, written when he was only 19, his principal focus began to shift. He did, however, continue to perform and record his own music.
Perhaps no Shostakovich recording is imbued with a greater sense of time and place than a 1954 performance of his Symphony No. 10. An arrangement, for piano four-hands, was played by the composer at his apartment with his close friend and neighbor Mieczyslaw Weinberg.
Weinberg found himself in a very precarious situation only the year before. He was arrested on a charge of “Jewish bourgeois nationalism,” in connection with the so-called Doctor’s Plot, at the command of Stalin himself, on the pretense that Jewish doctors were planning to assassinate Soviet officials. Weinberg’s father-in-law had been implicated, and killed. Shostakovich attempted to intercede on his friend’s behalf, but it was only with the sudden and fortuitous death of Stalin in 1953 that Weinberg was officially rehabilitated, and released.
In a piece of living history, these two artists sit down to perform on Shostakovich’s home piano. This is music that was claimed, in Solomon Volkov’s “Testimony,” Shostakovich’s alleged memoir, to be about Stalin and the Stalin years.The pianos used in some of these recordings may be a little rough around the edges, but they only lend to the neurotic intensity of the music-making. It’s also a kind of window into what it must have been like to have been a musician in Soviet Russia, between 1946 and 1958, commandeering whatever means of expression you could lay your hands on.
I hope you’ll join me for “Black and White and Red All Over,” remembering Dmitri Shostakovich on the 50th anniversary of his death, on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
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Shostakovich Birthday & “Lady Macbeth” Scandal
On Dmitri Shostakovich’s birthday, here’s some footage of the fleet-fingered composer knocking out a passage from his opera “Lady Macbeth from Mtsenk.”
This of course is the work that was lambasted in Pravda, following its premiere in 1936, as “muddle instead of music” – an assessment, said to have been Stalin’s own, that would have been enough to have given any Soviet artist the night sweats.
Sensing that he was walking on very thin Siberian ice, Shostakovich wisely suppressed his angry, dissonant, and frankly weird Fourth Symphony and launched into writing a Fifth, which he described as “a composer’s response to just criticism.” A good performance still has the power to exhilarate audiences, with its sense of hard-won triumph and the over-the-top grandiosity of its finale. But many have found in it a kind of shadow program that is rather more subversive.
In Solomon Volkov’s controversial “Testimony,” a memoir of challenged authenticity, assembled by Volkov from conversations with the composer, Shostakovich allegedly states, “I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in ‘Boris Godunov.’ It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’”
How much of “Testimony” is Shostakovich, and how much is Volkov? The original manuscript, in which the composer signed off on the first page of each of the chapters, was sold to an anonymous collector and never made available for scholarly investigation. Furthermore, Volkov maintains his original notes are lost. (He is still living, at 79 years-old.) Whether or not the book is everything Volkov and his publishers claim it to be, it does have the ring of truth.
From the rollicking nature of the piano excerpt, one would never guess at the inflammatory nature of the opera, a provocative tale of sexual violence, adultery, and (multiple) murder. The video does remind one that Shostakovich once supplemented his income by accompanying films at the cinema.
The Symphony No. 4 did not receive its first performance until 1961, eight years after Stalin’s death.
Happy (?) birthday, Dmitri Shostakovich!
The clip, by the way, has been circulating on YouTube for quite some time as part of other compilations, like this one, in which Shostakovich plays, speaks, and smokes!
PHOTO: In America, people talk about news. In Soviet Russia, news talks about you!
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Shostakovich Fall Back Time Change
Dmitri Shostakovich reminds you to turn your clocks tonight, as we “fall back” to standard time!
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