The Fifth Symphony, composed during the next year, enjoyed a much happier fate. His immense Fourth Symphony was written over the course of the subsequent months of 1936, but the work was withdrawn under suspicious circumstances shortly before its scheduled premiere in April. Shostakovich sought to deal with Stalin’s rebuke through continued work on new compositions. Those who dared to stand by Shostakovich, either personally or artistically, did so at grave risk to their own career, or even life. Thus began one of the saddest episodes in twentieth-century music history-the official exile of one of the Soviet Union’s most gifted talents. How many of us, for example, have at some time or other characterized some “popular” music as “coarse, primitive, vulgar”? These, however, are the precise words that appeared in a January 1936 article in Pravda entitled “Muddle Instead of Music,” an article (possibly authored by Joseph Stalin himself) that denounced Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and ballet, The Limpid Stream. A pejorative overtone creeps in, however, when one tries to define the word “popular” by seeking its opposite, such as when “popular” music (e.g., Rock, Hip-hop, or Traditional) is contrasted with “art” music (Symphonies, chamber music, Opera). Of Shostakovich’s fifteen symphonies, the Fifth Symphony is his most popular and frequently performed work.
The work was last performed by the Winston-Salem Symphony in the 2016/2017 season under the baton of Maestro Robert Moody. It is scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (triangle, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, bells, xylophone), 2 harps, piano, celesta, and strings. Its success was unequivocal and it remains of the landmark compositions of this century. His Fifth Symphony was first performed in Leningrad (now, once again, St. Although he composed in a wide variety of genres, including film scores, but is best known for his fifteen symphonies, which are among the finest examples of its kind from the mid-twentieth century. He was one of the Soviet Union’s greatest composers. 57ĭmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born in Saint Petersburg on September 12, 1906.
0 kommentar(er)
