Shostakovich Symphony No.4 Dutoit NHKso.

June,1994 at NHK Hall, Tokyo
Charles Dutoit, conductor
NHK Symphony Orchestra

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Shostakovich
• Symphony

[ffmandal]

Viva Dutoit!!!

[emmarayward]

Jesus guys, fuck the politics.  Does anybody care about the actual score?

[valikacska]

...as if he had not written - for some of us his greatest most intimate works - his string quartets...

to read politics into everything what DS created is a very inappropriate angle

and yes he is for many people a very special composer, Bartok would be another one

[hyeonj315]

Shostakovich is reason why i live.

[jessichaos08]

Yes people do care about the actual score

but to emotionally interpret the score and get a real understanding you must look at the politics of it as well.

I'm sorry to inform you music isn't always what is written on the page.

[shamrock929292]

That's an interesting point - for a symphony supposed to celebrate the winning of a war, it's hardly glorious and triumphant. It must have been sarcastic

[wbaker7]

i might add i didnt say that DS never challanged the Soviet regime again after 4th/Lady Mac. I said in a later comment Babi Yar also upset the authorities. What I did say was that the edge of originality in his early career was blunted Stalin and Co. -- doesnt mean he didnt produce good work, doesnt mean he wasnt brilliant, doesnt mean he isnt one of my favs, doesnt mean he didnt challenge the regime from time to time. All it means is that he wasnt part of the leading edge in music any more

[wbaker7]

u make a good point--it was expected he would deliver another great war symphony and as u say he did just the reverse. so i concede your point and no doubt it burned stalin and zhandov etc. having said that the 9th in many ways confirms my overall point--the 4th was his high point of creativity...the 9th although a defiance of what was expected was in many ways not original, ammusing for sure, but not original.

[ComtedeMonteC]

This comment factually incorrect. Shostakovich's 9th symphony was not at all approved of by Stalin and as a result of this symphony, asked for by Stalin to celebrate the victory at the end of WWII, Shostakovich lost his post at the Moscow conservatoire. The 9th symphony is sarcastic and Shostakovich is here thumbing his nose at Stalin.

[wbaker7]

but anyways your point seems to be that many of the themes of DS latter symphony existed in the 4th or earlier and were still present in latter years after for example he "apologized" for his supposed bourgeois deviance in the 4th/Lady Mac (offical title of the 5th is an apology from a Soviet artist)--i dont disagre; what i said that they had been conventionalized after the 4th--they lost their orignality...they were packaged to met the standards of the Soviet state

[wbaker7]

there was for example intense pressure on DS to withdraw his Babi Yar symphony or at least modify it (ie. make it less Jewish--it was politically incorrect in Soviet regime to only speak of the Hollocaust without the obliatory references to Soviet suffering in the war and I believe the memorial at Babi Yar did not even mention that the victims were Jewish which obviously offended DS) he could resist it unlike the time of the 4th/Lady Mac cuz he was so big by then. But the pressure was real,