Read my article on Shostakovich violin music in the current Strad - Interviews with Fischer, Kremer, Gluzman

It began with a fascinating conversation with violinist Vadim Gluzman in Amsterdam, last year. We spoke about Shostakovich's violin music for two hours, ahead of his performance of the Second Violin Concerto with Riccardo Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and you can read some excerpts of that discussion in a feature article in the Mary 2019 issue of The Strad, out now.

I was then lucky enough to speak with Gidon Kremer and Julia Fischer about their experiences with Shostakovich - in the case of Kremer, his memories of meeting the man himself. It wouldn't have been possible without the generous help of all three superstar soloists, along with Anja Rauschardt and Sonia Simmenauer, who were kind enough to put me in touch with two of my interviewees. It was also made possible by Bryan Rowell of the DSCH Journal, who kindly gave permission for the use of some translations made for the journal, and Elizabeth Wilson, whose own research informed the article also. I'm also grateful to Charlotte Smith at The Strad for her help and encouragement.

UPDATE: You can read a substantial chunk of the article here. Go on. Treat yourself.

Stalin's Favourite Stalin

The actor Mikheil Gelovani as Stalin in the film The Fall of Berlin (1950)

At school, I run a film club, and our most recent film was The Death of Stalin. The text that follows is from my introduction to the movie:

As chance would have it, I was just the other night at the first performance of Welsh National Opera’s new production of Sergei Prokofiev’sepic opera War and Peace. War and Peace caused Prokofiev no end of trouble: he had been lured back to the USSR in 1936, after almost two decades away in Europe, with the promise of artistic freedom and of a position as the Soviet Union’s leading composer. But in reality he found he was not free at all, and he spent the last 13 years of his life trying to get his mega-opera staged in its entirety. He thought he’d hit upon a winner: Tolstoy’s story of heroic Russian victory against Napoleon seemed totally right for the 1940s, just when the USSR was taking on Hitler’s army in the greatest war in history. It was potentially tricky, because the book and the opera commemorated one of the great triumphs of Tsarist Russia, but history was too important a weapon in the propaganda war to be ignored entirely. The audience could forget about the Tsar and instead focus on the great military hero of 1812, General Kutuzov, and make the obvious connection with their leader and teacher, Joseph Stalin. The Soviet government, though changed its mind very often about what was acceptable and what was not, and Prokofiev’s opera never quite made the cut. A second, much sadder occurrence of chance was that Prokofiev and Stalin died on the same day in 1953. Apparently, there were no flowers at Prokofiev’s memorial, because they had all been taken for Stalin’s funeral. But Stalin had, after all, spent two decades terrorising the Soviet people, liquidating millions of them in his slave labour camps and deliberate famines. Even in death, the fear lived on. No one was brave enough to steal so much as a rose from Stalin to offer to a mere composer.

It’s difficult for us now to imagine how powerful Stalin was, or what it would have been like to live under his rule. One well-known musician, who grew up in those days, told me that it is simply not possible for westerners to understand. You cannot imagine, he said. In the 1930s, Stalin had terrorised his population with arbitrary executions and deportations to Siberia. It didn’t really matter who died; Stalin wanted to eliminate his opponents, but he worked out that you could just kill anyone and the effect was the same. City authorities were instructed to round up and kill so-many thousands of people, regardless of their identity. If you introduced enough fear into people’s minds, they just stayed in line. Husbands or wives would be taken in the night by the secret police, and at work the next day, the remaining partner would have to make sure they smiled. To shed a tear for your disappeared spouse was to cry for an enemy of the people.

Terror was only one tool of the tyrant, however. Stalin controlled all information. Had you visited Moscow in the middle of the last century, you would have seen giant banners of the gods of Communism: Marx, Lenin and Joseph himself. The food on your table was put there by Stalin. The wage in your pocket, the school where you studied; thank you, Stalin. He may as well have been the sun in the sky. The films in the cinema celebrated all the wonderful things about Soviet life. They told you that Stalin had brought order to the chaos of Tsarist Russia. They told you that Stalin had led the nation against the greatest evil in history, and won. They didn’t have to tell you this; they showed you. More than one actor played Stalin on screen, but he had a favourite. Mikheil Gelovani was so good at it that he wasn’t allowed to play anyone else. Once you’ve played a god, you don’t act the part of mere mortals. European history was rewritten for the epic propaganda film The Fall of Berlin in 1950, which shows the saintly Stalin (dressed in white) leading the good fight while his supposed allies scheme and plot. It’s actually a lot like Prokofiev’s War and Peace, which the composer was still fiddling with at the time, though it was Shostakovich who got to write the music for the film. There’s a love story, the lovers are separated by war, and then Stalin leads his Soviet people to victory. At the end of the film, Gelovani’s Stalin flies into Berlin to give a speech to the Russian victors. It didn’t happen, but Stalin liked the scene so much that he regretted not having done it for real.

A lot of people smile in The Fall of Berlin, but the smiles were only for the camera. When the film was released, Stalin was in the middle of unleashing a fresh wave of terror, which culminated in the supposed Doctor’s Plot, a fake conspiracy which was used to purge Jews from the medical profession. All of this was carried out by Stalin’s right-hand man and secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, who in his spare time liked to cruise round Moscow in his limousine in the small hours and pick up young ladies to drug, rape and bury in the garden. But the terror and fear and executions finally did it for Stalin. When he fell ill, in 1953, it took hours before anyone was brave enough to enter his bedroom. There weren’t any doctors left; they were all in prison. And without the boss to tell them what to do, his deputies ran around frantically, suspicious of each other and trying to stay alive. It would have been funny had it not been so awful.

There’s a fine line, though, between funny and awful. Armando Iannucci saw as much in Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin’s graphic novel La mort de Staline, and he’s made it into a funny and horrible film. If, at the end, you wonder how much of it is true, the answer is: the broad strokes. They’ve compressed the timeframe; what appears to take days in reality took longer. We don’t really know all the details, and that suits the storytellers just fine. It works as a comedy, because the way in which people behave in awful situations is often so absurd. Not everyone saw the funny side – one leading historian wrote a rather po-faced article, counting the historical errors and referring to the film as “Carry On Up the Kremlin”.

Jason Issacs in The Death of Stalin

But the joke really fell flat in Moscow, where The Death of Stalin has the dubious honour of being the first film to be banned since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Public figures called the film “vile, repugnant and insulting”, and although the banning was partly an attempt by the Russian government to put behind it an embarrassing episode involving the release of Paddington 2, it was also clear that the film did not fit a particular version of history which Putin’s government is keen to impose. Like General Kutuzov before him, Stalin is a figure who suits the aspirations of the current leader of Russia. In Stalin, if you ignore the killings and the torture, rests the image of strong leader who, if you tell the story right, united the Soviet state behind the single purpose of defeating fascism. Stalin was not the only person who could cherry-pick from history. And so, the Russian film industry is very busy producing sumptuous films which glorify the Second World War and the heroism of the Russians who fought in it. A notable example is Panfilov’s 28 Men, a 2016 war film telling the story of a group of Russian soldiers who held out against overwhelming German forces during the Battle of Moscow in 1941. At the time, the Soviet newspaper Pravda carried a report detailing the noble self-sacrifice of the troops; the problem was, it was only partly true. It happened over 70 years ago, but when the distance between the legend and the reality was brought up recently, the Russian culture minister retorted angrily that the story was “a sacred legend that shouldn’t be interfered with. People that do that are filthy scum.”

Of course, it’s easy to point out the holes in other people’s national myths. We certainly could ask where all the successful British films are that properly interrogate the complex legacy of colonialism. And it is true that Putin is no Stalin. There are no untold millions languishing in secret prison camps in Russia today. There aren’t long lists of names being issued by the Kremlin for immediate liquidation, though here in Wiltshire, we know they’re dabbling. But Putin’s government demonstrates the familiar irritation that authoritarians usually show for those who fail to treat the useful bits of history with the required respect. 

Image(s) are used under the principle of fair use for the purposes of review and study and will be removed at the request of the copyright holder(s).

Five Glimpses of Gennady Rozhdestvensky

In memory of Gennady Rozhdestvensky (1931-2018), who died one month ago today.

1

Gennady Rozhdestvensky is watching a student closely. The young conductor in the loose suit clasps the air, and maestro’s onto him. “What was that gesture with your left hand?” he snaps. “To stop” says the student, apologetically. “Stop what? A draft? What’s the point of stopping those who aren’t playing?” Movement is an anathema to Rozhdestvensky’s conducting. Not show; barely moving can become a show, as he spends a lifetime demonstrating. But a grand arc of the arms, when a turn of the head or a shrug of the shoulders will make the point? A waste.  Upon his death, this June, his friend Gerard McBurney tells the BBC about the habits of Rozhdestvensky’s craft. “He had an extraordinary gift for conducting the way musicians want conductors to work – without words. He never talked about the music. He just did everything through his eyes, his eyebrows, his smile, and his hands and his baton.” And if the movement tells all, why spend the afternoon labouring the point? “He didn’t rehearse much and they were all really delighted because they’d knock off early and go home,” says long-time Rozhdestvensky-watcher David Nice, of the conductor’s BBC Symphony Orchestra years. “They loved him for that. What he brought to the actual performance though was something completely different and inspirational, which hadn’t ever happened in the rehearsal.” His musical appetite is voracious. Have you ever heard a Russian orchestra play a Vaughan Williams symphony? Rozhdestvensky recorded them all. A shark must keep moving through the water in order to breathe, but no more than that.

2

Gennady Rozhdestvensky is old before his time. He is barely twenty years of age, but his hair is thinning, almost gone. He leads the Bolshoi in a performance of The Nutcracker and from this moment on, he will be a conductor of ballet. Where others will scorn it as menial stickwork, he will take the great scores of the ballet repertoire to his heart; he will blow the dust from their covers and dance them with his hands. In the dying days of the Soviet Union, the youthful ballets of his friend Shostakovich come down from the shelf and move once more: The Golden Age; The Bolt; The Limpid Stream. Bright jewels from days of possibility, before the scales fell and terror enveloped all. Rozhdestvensky bears witness to most of the Soviet era, but not its beginning. His father was there, with the Red Army, putting down the sailors’ revolt at Kronstadt, near Petrograd, in 1921. His father, Nikolai Anosov, a conductor. Mikhail Tukhachevsky led the forces of the Bolsheviks that day, leaving 10,000 rebel bodies strewn across the wreckage and the winter ice. Tukhachevksy, the patron of Shostakovich during his ballet days. Tukhachevsky, the name no one dared speak after he was swallowed by Stalin’s purge. Time passes and the fear recedes, but never completely. The young man learns the choreography of professional and political survival, but from a comfortable distance, they’ll ask, as though it were really that simple: “but he wasn’t for the communists, surely?”

3

He crouches, in conference, with his greatest compatriots. The Royal Festival Hall, London, 1960. Mstislav Rostropovich with his cello and Shostakovich talking around what he really means. “Good! Very good! But could it be a little quieter?” Two years later, Rozhdestvensky will bring to the West an earthquake, on paper, in the form of Shostakovich’s long-dormant Fourth Symphony, put away in more difficult times. And every time he brings a Soviet orchestra as news of Red culture, Rozhdestvensky will enter into battle with the bureaucracy, with the swamp of officialdom that doesn’t know, and doesn’t care, and has its instructions, comrade. Much later, he recalls, for Bruno Monsaingeon’s film The Red Baton, going to an official’s office and being informed that 10% of his orchestra would not be authorised to travel abroad. Which 10%? Well, that’s to be decided later. The list, when it arrives, pulls 9 wind players and 3 strings. “You knew you had to plan replacements!” hisses the official. Rozhdestvensky continues:

“Yes”, I said, “But how can I explain it? There are nine woodwinds and three strings, but you see, these people play different songs. Those with bows play one song, and those with whistles play other songs. Put them all together and you get a symphony. The bows can maybe be replaced because they basically all do the same thing. As for the others, I can’t replace them. How can we wave the flag of Soviet art if songs are missing from the symphony?” His eyes popped out as if he’d discovered America. He’d obviously never heard an orchestra. Six months later, another tour, another 12 musicians banned from traveling. But this time it was nine strings and three woodwinds! I went back to the same functionary. He was flabbergasted. “What’s wrong now? We hardly touched the whistles! Only three. We have to eliminate people, that’s our job!”

4

Gennady Rozhdestvensky is surrounded by books. In a century in which knowledge has burned so easily, he has treasured it, acquiring so many volumes that he needs a second apartment to house them all. He emerges from his reading, and he sparkles. “Imagine an amalgam of Sir Thomas Beecham, Peter Ustinov and Isaiah Berlin,” recalls his agent, Robert Slotover, for the BBC. “An hour with Gennady Nikolaevich is like a year at university”, comments the writer Viktor Borovsky. He is sage, but elusive. “He was a bit teasy and whimsical”, says David Nice of interviewing Rozhdestvensky in the 1990s. “You thought you’d got very little, but when you played it back you’d got quite a lot, because he tended to express himself aphoristically.” But he is vulnerable and ever-so-easily bruised. One afternoon, he sits in his dressing room at the venue of a west-European orchestra with whom he has had an occasional association, and notices that his name is not mentioned in the ensemble’s brief biography. Rage and accusations follow. And this is not the only such outburst. His face so often settles into a knowing smile, but sometimes the play and the lightness will fall away.

5

The old order is gone; the new one is not so very different. Vladimir Putin reaches out to grasp the hand of the beaming maestro, the People’s Artist of the USSR, Hero of Socialist Labour and, in 2017, recipient of the Order of Merit to the Fatherland (1^st Class). Rozhdestvensky’s walking stick leaves the ground as he turns to the cameras, hand-in-hand with his president. A month later, he is in the German town of Gohrisch, leading the Dresden Staatskapelle in a last performance of symphonies by Shostakovich. There are nerves. Mistakes are made, some very large. But something remarkable happens during the 15^th Symphony, Shostakovich’s enigmatic valediction to the form. Where it can seem light and flippant, the Dresedeners and their octogenarian time traveller draw from it solemnity and grim conviction. The chilly air of a tomb inhabits this performance, and it proceeds slowly – very slowly indeed – as though the man on the podium, a man nearing the end of a long life, is looking back to his friend whose own life was not nearly long enough, but who lives still for as long as the notes are ringing. Eventually, the stick goes down, and there’s only quiet.



The top image shows Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting the Dresden Staatskapelle at the 2017 International Shostakovich Days festival in Gohrisch. Image(s) are used under the principle of fair use for the purposes of review and study and will be removed at the request of the copyright holder(s). My thanks for David Nice for his help preparing this piece and to Gerard McBurney and Robert Slotover for giving their permission to quote their tributes to Gennady Rozhdestvesnky.

Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, great Russian conductor, is gone.

Dmitri Shostakovich, Mstislav Rostropovich and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky
at London's Royal Festival Hall in 1960

Today feels like the end of an era. It was announced that, after a long illness, the great Russian conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvesnky died this morning. He was born in 1931 and was one of the last remaining and active musicians to have had a substantial career in the Soviet period. He was particularly associated with the music of Shostakovich, whose early opera The Nose he revived in 1974. His association with Shostakovich actually began in the 1950s, and he became a champion of the 4th Symphony when it was finally premiered in 1961 - although Kirill Kondrashin conducted the first performance, Rozhdestvensky brought the piece to the west, in 1962.

He was also a great promoter of contemporary music in the later Soviet period, and worked hard to secure a performance of his friend Alfred Schnittke's radical First Symphony in the 1970s. He had a particular passion for English music and even recorded a complete cycle of Vaughan Williams's symphonies.

With his passing, we lose one of the last links to a remarkable, difficult and fascinating part of music history. He worked until his last months, and everyone who loves Russian music must hold him dear.

One turn of the dial: Grigori Kozintsev on filming good and evil

It so happens that, by itself, the activity of a people – its selfless devotion to duty, its bravery – can be evaluated only when the goal to that activity is known. Sometimes the artist need not be explicit about the goals; the audience will perceive the action of the screen as though it were tuned in on a definite wave length of spiritual activity by an associative force, tuned in on a conditional reflex of attitudes toward good and evil.

During the Second World War, William Wyler directed his Memphis Belle. The film contains shots of a bomb run by flying fortresses, the life of the pilots, their military work, the return to base under fire.

The chronicle is filmed as entertainment: it shows the characters of the pilots, their mutual relations, tastes, customs. Their tastes are not demanding. A picture is painted on the side of an airplane: a bathing beauty sticks out her rear end. Returning from a run (mortal danger and the bravery of the crew is indicated; there are quite a few seriously wounded), the pilots slap the Memphis Belle on her behind; it’s a custom.

In this case, neither the drawing itself nor the conduct of the men is in any way attractive of itself. Wyler does not show the enemy: bombings are filmed from the plane (little squares for objectives, the smoke of explosions, shell craters). But the audience sees the movie as though tuned in on a certain wave length: hatred for fascism is already a conditioned reflex.

The American fly-boys, their bravery, and even their joke about the girl in the bathing suit, all seem attractive, profoundly human.

Now let us imagine this film in its entirety as taking place in Korea. Just as any turn, however insignificant, of the radio dial will tune in another station, so here everything becomes different and the interpretation makes an about-face. The men are murderers; their life is coarse. And the bawd in the bathing suit becomes a symbol: here are the ideals and the culture in the name of which these thugs have flown across an ocean in order to annihilate a people fighting for their freedom and human dignity.

From the notes of Grigori Kozintsev, made during the filming of his 1964 adaptation of Hamlet (with music by Dmitri Shostakovich), published in his book Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, which was translated by Joyce Vining in 1966.

Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

A Rare Russian Treat, Tomorrow on BBC Radio 3

Rozhdestvensky (right) at a rehearsal with Shostakovich and Rostropovich, in 1960.

Few great musicians of the era of Shostakovich survive now, but the legendary conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky is still out there, offering a very real link to the greatest of Soviet composers. Rozhdestvensky worked with Shostakovich between the early 1960s and his death in 1975, most notably on the late revival of the opera The Nose. Rozhdestvensky's appearances in the West are relatively rare these days, but he did appear, in Dresden, earlier this year, conducting the first and last Shostakovich symphonies. The concert is broadcast on Radio 3 on Monday 13th November, at 2pm, and will be available for 30 days afterwards for UK users.

Rozhdestvensky leads the Dresden Staatskapelle in tomorrow's broadcast. The orchestra has a fine history with Shostakovich, and recordings are available of them in symphonies conducted by another great Shostakovich maestro, Kirill Kondrashin. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Tanks, Catcalls and Correcting a Correction

On August 21st, 1968, star Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was scheduled to play Dvorak's Cello Concerto at the Royal Albert Hall, and the irony was lost on no one. The day before, half a million Warsaw Pact troops had poured into Czechoslovakia, land of Dvorak's birth, to crush a remarkable flowering of liberal socialism which, in Moscow's eyes, could not be allowed continue. For months, under the leadership of Alexandr Dubcek, Prague had been reforming industry and freedom of speech. Soviet tanks rolling into Czech cities, on August 20th, signaled the end of Moscow's patience.

Rostropovich, alive to the symbolism of his performance of the greatest Czech work for the instrument, reportedly played with tears in his eyes. On stage beside him were the Soviet conductor Yevgeny Svetlanov, and the USSR State Symphony Orchestra. The mood in the hall was electric, though as the performance began, the protests which threatened to drown out the music subsided. The concert, which concluded with Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, has gone down in legend as one of the 20th century's most remarkable.

These sort of events always attract a certain degree of myth. Did tears really stream down Slava's face? Did anti-Soviet protesters really drown out the music? A letter to BBC Music Magazine, printed in their new December issue, sought to correct this one. No, Victor and Lilian Hochhauser, the impresarios who arranged the concert, firmly state in relation to the second. They write:

"As we were responsible for negotiating the visit of the cellist Mstislav Rostropotvich and the USSR State Symphony Orchestra to the BBC Proms on 21 August 1968 and subsequently to the Edinburgh Festival, we wish to point out the inaccuracies in Peter Haydn Pike's letter (September)."

They continue:

"In view of the Soviet invasion into Prague, we were all expecting trouble, but there was absolutely no interruption during Rostropovich's emotionally charged performance of the Dvorak Cello Concerto, no 'catcalls' to drown out the Shostakovich symphony, and the concert was broadcast in full."

The concert was broadcast, and the two pieces were released on CD, the Dvorak by BBC Legends and the Shostakovich on a separate disc by ICA Classics. Trouble is - there are interruptions, and there are catcalls. Hecklers threaten to hold up the start of Dvorak's Concerto, though they stop before the first note is heard. Things are different, though, in the Shostakovich. Hecklers yell, though it's not clear what, and the first, quiet bars of the Symphony are lost in a melee of protest and lots of shushing. (The first movement is not to be found on Youtube; Spotify users can find the recording there).

I'm not taking aim at the Hochhausers here, who've mixed with the legends of 20th century classical music and without whom London's concert scene would have been much the poorer. But memory's a funny thing, isn't it?

I took a pic of the page in question. Also, you can enjoy the "gems" from Twitter and Facebook.

The header picture is credited to "YouTube", though I suspect they didn't take it. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Making a good impression: The music of The Death Of Stalin

Can brutal dictatorships ever be funny? Armando Iannucci thinks so, and he's crafted a hilarious and terrifying film about the farcical circumstances surrounding the death of just about the baddest dictator of them all, Joseph Stalin, in 1953. The humour in his film The Death of Stalin arises from a few things. People act absurdly as they second-guess everything that is ever said to them. Stalin's ministers scramble for position as his body lies on his office carpet, still warm. And then there's the way with language familiar from Iannucci projects stretching back to the news spoofs On The Hour and The Day Today (old collaborator David Schneider joins him in the screenplay credits). Iannucci and friends are able to render horrible insults and threats funny by their weird specificity (see Beria shouting, from a little window, that he'll gouge out someone's eyes one at a time "so you can watch it happen"). Some question whether this grim moment in history should be played for laughs (see historian Richard Overy's po-faced critique of the film's historical accuracy, for example), but the humour heightens the horror. No one here is making light of on-the-spot executions or Beria's hideous abuses.

Most in the audience will, I suspect, find themselves too gripped by the grim spectacle of Stalin's ministers climbing over each other to advance their careers / survive (often both) to have noticed what goes on on the soundtrack. Mozart and Tchaikovsky here rub shoulders with a Shostakovich-sound-alike score from Christopher Willis, who has worked on a previous Iannucci series, Veep. I suspect Iannucci - a keen classical music lover - knows enough about Shostakovich to have asked Willis for something along the lines of the 10th and 11th Symphonies, which come from 1953 (the year of Stalin's death) and 1957 (a year after Khrushchev's "Secret Speech") respectively.  Willis has done very well, contributing music that sounds like those pieces, and which nods in their direction without borrowing too heavily from them. Listen out for a moment of muted, glassy strings, recalling a favourite atmospheric effect of DDS's, used in a number of the symphonies. There's also a mini-piano concerto which blends the nervy pianism of the 1st Concerto with squawky wind-heavy orchestration of the 2nd. Willis elsewhere mentions Weinberg as a reference point too, though I'd have to know my Weinberg better to spot quite how. Interestingly, the symphonies are the reference point, rather than the workmanlike film scores that Shostakovich pumped out during this period. The decision has generally been taken to avoid the faux-propaganda stylings we get so often, and I'm glad of that.

One element of the plot which could have been developed further involves a concert pianist, seen playing Mozart's 23rd Concerto at the start and the end, who turns out to be Maria Yudina. She's not (I don't think) referred to by her surname during the film, and I didn't guess it was meant to be her until I read the credits later. Her anti-Stalin feelings are not in question - she was a rare example of an off-message voice who was tolerated - and her intense religious faith is hinted at in the film. She's played younger in the film, though, than her actual 54 years, and rather more glamorous too. The whole, rather brilliant, opening scene of the film is based around a story from 1944 (moved up to 1953 here) of the scramble to record a version of a live radio performance after-the-fact, after Stalin requested a copy, and the on-air rendition had gone untaped. The source for this story seems to be the Shostakovich "memoir" Testimony (and you might know what I think of that), though there may be corroboration elsewhere.

Shostakovich fans can go and see the film confident in the knowledge that a particularly skillful pastiche of their favourite awaits, and everyone else can enjoy the jokes and cower at the brutality hidden in plain view.

I should also mention that the film is based on the graphic novel by Fabien Nury; proof to the skeptical, hopeful, that those things can have some value.

The image at the top is the film's best poster, I think, which uses a different visual trope of Soviet propaganda to to slanty 1920s stuff we usually see. The image is used for the purposes of review and study and falls under "fair use"; it will be removed at the request of the copyright holder(s)

Rachmaninov Uncovered

When I first thought about writing about music, I remember the limits of my ambition being the idea of writing the programme notes for my local amateur orchestra. One day, it happened - the man who did them retired, and it turned out it wasn't as sought after a job as I'd imagined. A little later, I started playing the violin with the orchestra, very very badly, at the back of the 2nds. The job of designing to posters also came up, and I tried that out too.

I thought of all this the other day when I saw an angry professor of music on Twitter taking exception to the design of the CD on the cover of the new issue of BBC Music Magazine. I like to think of the professor of music in question as a friend of this blog, though I don't bring it up here intending to weigh in on one side or the other. Rather, it got me thinking about the way in which design suggests intention, or maybe its lack, and whether when borrowing imagery from the past, we aren't sometimes a little blasé about its origins.

But back to those posters. The only tools I ever had at my disposal were MS Publisher and the image editing software Gimp, which was on the receiving end of a lot of swearing and which I never really figured out. One of my first efforts was for a concert we put on of Russian music and, far more ignorant of Russian history than I now am, I reached for as many cliches as MS Publisher was fit to hold.

I threw slanty propaganda-style text at it, a splash of anachronistic red (look at the composers involved) and an image of St Basil's Cathedral for good measure. I had remembered putting in some Cyrillic style backwards Rs, but I clearly thought better of it before submitting the final draft. This concoction of visual stereotypes seems rather ghastly to me now, but it did the job at the time.

Next for the over-literal-visual-treatment was the New World Symphony. You can probably spot some Morris tropes beginning to develop - the big white spaces (you couldn't have a hard edge or border because the cutting process wasn't that precise), primary colours, and a favourite MS font which sadly doesn't appear in more recent versions of the programme. You know what, though? I still rather like this one.

This next one came from the legendary occasion when we played a November 11th remembrance concert with a difference - the difference being the inclusion of the first movement of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, for reasons which made sense to us at the time. It was as incredible as it sounds. And a fun fact - the future principal trumpet of the Philharmonia was one of 4 trumpet extras we added to our existing two, just for that piece. 

Now this one, if I may say, was a visual coup. I still have no idea how I managed to get Beethoven's eyes inside the shape of a lark (again, look at the programme).

The same sea of white space in this Elgar one, but you know what? I stand by it. Nice job.

This was my last and, if I may say, Best Ever BSO poster. I had learnt what to do with the oodles of required information, and I think really maxed out the potential of MS Publisher. But enough of BSO posters already - what about Rachmaninov?

Rachmaninov left Russia for good in 1917, after the October/November Revolution. Florid programme notes (like mine) like to describe the eve of his departure, with bullets whistling down the streets outside while the composer, in a white-heat of inspiration, rewrote his youthful 1st Piano Concerto, barely noticing the sounds of the world changing. But he was no fan of the Bolsheviks, and the loss of his homeland was clearly a source of great distress to him.

So it's rather incongruous for BBC Music Magazine to have slapped a picture of Lenin (in stained glass??) on the front of their cover CD, which features a performance of Rachmaninov's Preludes. What did Rachmaninov have to do with Lenin? As little as possible, the joke might end. Our musicologist friend put this to the publication, who responded that Lenin had more to do with Prokofiev and the disc's artist, Sviatoslav Richter, though it's hard to know quite what - Prokofiev skipped the country a few months after the Revolution and only resettled in the country in 1936, twelve years after Lenin's death. And Richter, though based in the Soviet Union until its demise, had his international career thoroughly thwarted by Soviet concert planners, who clearly saw him as some sort of flight risk (this is covered in Bruno Monsaingeon's excellent documentary on Soviet music, The Red Baton (Notes Interdites in the original French), and quite possibly in his essential film-interview with Richter, though it's been years since I saw that so I can't remember).

So there's an issue of relevance, though that's hardly new - British cultural institutions are quite happy to wheel out the Russian visual cliches to shift their Russian concerts, etc, and I can tell you that when designing that first poster, I was just drawing on the sort of visual shorthands for Russia that are all around in PR (silly me). It isn't unusual to see musical programmes relating to aspects of Russian history that include music only very tenuously connected to it. I wonder if we'd accept the same sort of tokenistic approach to cultures more readily associated with the current interest in identity politics?

There's a deeper problem, though, and it has to do with the willingness to reach for imagery that has altogether more sinister associations. It's actually unthinkable that a CD company would decorate their disc with an image of Hitler, and highly unlikely they'd go for Mussolini, or Franco, yet the Soviets aren't so off-limits. Lenin didn't commit the crimes of Stalin, but his rule was based on a large-scale disregard for the lives of those deemed outside the Communist project, and it's worth remembering that his economic policies during the Russian Civil War led to the deaths of millions of people through starvation. What would we be saying about our attitudes towards or even knowledge of these issues if we thought of his image as something attractive to cut and paste onto out CD cover? It's certainly not "overthinking" the problem to ask this question.

It's not as though BBC Music Magazine is alone in appropriating the imagery of totalitarian Russia. We are particularly in thrall to Stalinist propaganda, and with some good reason - its distinctive, highly effective and visually appealing. But we have to ask what that style was in service of, and whether we betray a certain crass disregard for its implications by pinching it to spice up our PR campaigns. I suspect this problems arises from the lack of clean break with Leninist and Stalinist Russia, which never fell from Western favour with the force that some those European fascist regimes did in 1945. Stalin lived on, having really won the Second World War, and his own propagandist legacy never decisively became the other half of a binary shared with Western might and light, in the way Hitler's did.

So the imagery stays with us, but without the black and white moral colouring of an SS uniform. Images, though, do add up to something, particularly in combination with other images. Any designer should be aware that pictures from the past carry worlds of baggage and meaning, and that we must dip into the art-box of history with caution. 

There was some discussion about the preferred spelling of Rachmaninov - He himself was apparently in favour of Rachmaninoff, but I just can't do it myself. I do look forward to hearing the Rachmaninov disc, and to discovering if the cover article on Shostakovich and the Soviet government departs from the formula.  The image of the November issue of BBC Music Magazine was posted on their Twitter account. I made all those posters, so I suppose the copyright rests with me; any other images have been used for the purposes of review and study and fall under "fair use"; they will be removed at the request of the copyright holder(s).

Portrait of Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich by Andrew Morris, pencil on paper, August 2017.

Shosta-faux-vich

He's heard this one before.

A Proms performance of Shostakovich's ubiquitous Fifth Symphony at the weekend brought out all its accumulated myths and canards, gleefully repeated by critics, programme note writers and radio presenters. They're trotted out so often, so relentlessly, that they may as well be true now, but from my little corner of the internet, I may as well offer a little corrective, because in all honesty, who else will?

If the story of the Fifth is not known to you, here's a brief recap. In January 1936, Shostakovich was riding high from the success of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, an adaptation of Leskov's 1865 grim novella of the same name. Such was its acclaim that productions had already been staged in Leningrad and Moscow, but after a two-year run, the piece was to suffer a spectacular fall from grace when Joseph Stalin decided to attend a performance. Stalin's party left before the end, and a few days later an infamous review appeared in the official Soviet newspaper Pravda, entitled "Muddle instead of music". It railed against the cacophonous decadence of the piece and, in a vein which was to become very familiar to Soviet composers, complained "the power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, 'formalist' attempt to create originality through cheap clowning." It concluded, ominously, "It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly."

It was clear that the review followed as a direct consequence of Stalin's visit, but the extent to which he himself dictated its contents has been a matter of some speculation. It's juicier, of course, to state that Stalin himself penned the piece, though I've never come across any evidence to support this one. There's then usually a compression of what happened next: Shostakovich, who was working on his Fourth Symphony in the early months of 1936, is often said to have abandoned the piece forthwith, taking the end of the review (that it "may end very badly") as a clear hint that trouble of the terminal kind may follow if his present musical path wasn't left behind. But that's not quite true.

In fact, he remained bullish, despite the shock of the Pravda review. His close friend Isaak Glikman later recalled the composer saying "Even if they chop my hands off, I will continue to compose music - albeit I will have to hold the pen in my teeth." And, despite what you'll read elsewhere, he carried on working on his wild and complex Fourth Symphony for months; he played it for Otto Klemperer in May, four months after the review appeared, apparently with every intention of having it performed at home and abroad. And it went on like this. In the Autumn of 1936, full orchestral rehearsals were held, and it was only at this point, after a number of such sessions had happened, that the composer seems to have been convinced to cancel the Symphony's first performance. Even then, accounts differ as to quite why: some claim that the orchestra and conductor were under-prepared for the difficulties presented by the piece, though the more often accepted story has Shostakovich having a visit from some Party officials and being talked into dropping the whole thing.

Why does this matter? Well, compressing the narrative gives a very different impression of Shostakovich's propensity to take fright and his willingness to compromise artistic principles. The Shostakovich of the compressed narrative emerges far more inclined towards saving his own skin, though given the show trials and widespread executions of the period, such an impulse would be eminently understandable. The Shostakovich of reality remained committed to his artistic path for some months in the face of some very open official intimidation.

He did cave in the end, though, and modified his music enough for his next symphony, the Fifth, to be widely regarded as a "corrective". This one unfolded in a much more traditional manner - sonata form first movement, scherzo, slow movement and an apparently triumphant finale - though its more conventional form did provide the model for similarly proportioned symphonies (the Tenth, and to a lesser extent the Eighth) in which he was able to say some quite complex things. It also provided the rhetorical cipher for a new sort of musical irony, one in which the music could be viewed as saying the exact opposite of what it superficially appeared to be saying. The ending, famously, could be a glorious celebration, or it could be an utterly hollow fanfare, with tears of defeat streaming down the face as the mouth grins on.

But before we get too deep into irony, it's worth stopping to discredit the most common canard of them all: the Symphony's famous subtitle, "a Soviet artist's response to just criticism". This phrase, replete with either contrition or irony, depending on your point of view, is often placed into the mouth of Shostakovich, but it doesn't seem to have actually emerged from there. Rather, it was coined by a journalist, writing about the Symphony (I don't know who, but I recall hearing someone give the identity of the author). In Laurel Fay's biography of Shostakovich, the composer is reported as having written "one [critical interpretation] gave me special pleasure, where it was said that the Fifth Symphony is the practical creative answer of a Soviet artist to just criticism", a quotation credited to an article with the composer's name attached in a Moscow newspaper. 

So the composer seems to have acknowledged the statement (assuming that the article was written by him, which they weren't always), but he didn't come up with it and, importantly, it doesn't appear on the score as any kind of a subtitle. It may well have been popularly associated with the Symphony, at the time and after, but there's a difference between that and it being the kind of official subtitle as it is often purported to have been. Why does this matter? Well, firstly because it's not true and is frequently stated as being true, and secondly because putting it into Shostakovich's mouth suggests an attempt by the composer to shape the literal interpretation of the work in a way that he seems to have been, at all points in his career, very reluctant to do. For a long time, the statement was taken literally; latterly and in the light of the "revelations" of the now-discredited memoirs Testimony, as a statement of brazen irony equal to that signaled in the Symphony's closing minutes. If Shostakovich didn't make the statement (which he didn't) then a move in the ironic shadow-dance is subtracted and we're left to look for our answers in the music.

One more thing. If we're going to preface our quotations from Volkov's Testimony with words like "disputed" or "widely disbelieved" or "thoroughly discredited", then don't we have to stop quoting lines like "your business is rejoicing!" and, in the case of the Tenth Symphony, "a portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking"?

Those were the Proms that were

Semyon Bychkov and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms (Photo: Andrew Morris)

It's gone so quickly, especially when seen from a distance. There may be two weeks left, but my Proms are over, save the delayed TV relays and the Last Night hate-watch which, as ever, I hope none of my non-classical friends tune in for. And the distance is because I have never lived further from Prince Albert's mighty, wildly unsuitable hall, so four visits was my lot this 2017 season.

One solitary promenade in the arena meant I stood for less than any season since 2002, but that one Prom was a whopper. Rattle's Gurrelieder - effectively beginning his LSO tenure in style - was the one I'd mentally marked on P-Day (when the Proms are announced and which, now I think about it, is NOT a good name). UK people with a internets can see it on the iPlayer until the end of September, and would be advised to seek it out as, like an eclipse, it's a heavenly wonder that doesn't come around that often.

The others were all Bachtrackers - two from the BBC NOW at the start of the season (Prom 5 and Prom 6), the highlight of which was Nicola Benedetti's completely incredible performance of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto (and you may have heard that I like him). My last visit was last week's BBCSO performance of Tchaikovsky's Manfred, which you can read about here (look out for a favorite character from Toy Story in the review. See, you want to know now.)

Igor Levit's monumental performance of Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues

Birmingham Town Hall (Photo: Andrew Morris)

My long drive up to Birmingham was rewarded with an intense and riveting performance of Shostakovich’s mighty Preludes and Fugues from pianist of the moment, Igor Levit. Here’s the introduction to my Bachtrack review:

Deep into Igor Levit’s monumental Birmingham Town Hall performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s vast cycle of Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues, I wondered if this work was some kind of Everest for pianists. It’s rare to meet it complete, in concert. The careful, transparent counterpoint places exacting demands on its interpreters and although it’s never flashy, there are devilishly difficult corners. Success here depends upon unwavering concentration from musician and listener alike. If you fell, there’d be no soft landing, and certainly nowhere to hide. But the mountain analogy only gets you so far. This isn’t music of lofty vistas, of high-wire daring or summit-triumph. Shostakovich’s immaculate miniatures are spare, interior, and their rewards quiet and very personal. When Levit reached the final page of the last, defiant fugue – the effort and intensity registering on his face and his hands pounding out its final unisons – it was clear that this was a long, lonely and intensely moving pilgrimage to some of the subtlest landscapes the piano can paint.

Read on here.

The Youth of Today

When I started going to the Proms some 15 years ago, there seemed to be a gulf in quality between the playing of some of the regional British ensembles whose appearances were peppered throughout season and the big international orchestras who rolled in at the end. These days, I don’t hear such a gap, and I wonder if the standard of playing hasn’t improved across the board. I recently heard a segment from a recording made in the late 1980s that seemed to confirm this suspicion.

Around 30 years ago, Vladimir Ashkenazy began a series of Shostakovich recordings with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The Fourth Symphony was an early entry in that series: it’s a beast and surely enough to give musicians sleepless nights, but some segments of the recording were so poorly played that I struggle to understand why it was ever issued. Indeed, when Decca collected Ashkenazy’s eventual cycle on CD about a decade ago, the original recording of the Fourth was replaced with a new one with the NHK Symphony Orchestra. (It’s only fair to say that I’ve heard the RPO’s playing match that of any of the world’s great orchestras, so perhaps unfamiliarity with the music or some other factor was to blame)

It is, then, something of a sign of the times that a remarkable youth orchestra, the Portland Youth Philharmonic, gives a really bracing performance on Youtube. There must have been some raised eyebrows when the orchestra programmed the piece, but it’s a great success – just listen to the frenzied fugue at 15:17. Gripping stuff.

Shostakovich - Symphony No 4

1st Movement

2nd Movement

3rd Movement

More Oistrakh, More Shostakovich

Fortunately, David Oistrakh’s valuable collaborations with Shostakovich came at a moment able to capture their development in the studio and in the concert hall. In one case, it was even able to capture composer and performer on the phone – more on that later.

The First Concerto is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most frequently listed piece in the Oistrakh discography, but at least three other pieces – the Second Violin Concerto, the Violin Sonata and the Second Piano Trio – received recordings by the great violinist.

Piano Trio No 2 in E minor, Op 67 (1944)

Oistrakh recording with the composer comes pretty early in the Oistrakh-Shostakovich relationship, indeed shortly before the time that Shostakovich began working on the First Violin Concerto and it’s tempting to think we might be hearing part of process that led to the composition of that masterpiece:

1946 – DO with Dmitri Shostakovich and Milos Sadlo (released a number of times on CD; most easily available on the first volume of Doremi’s Oistrakh collection)

Violin Concerto No 2 in C# minor, Op 129 (1967)

The story goes that Shostakovich intended to mark Oistrakh’s 60^th birthday with another violin concerto, but was a year premature. Given the piece was written only seven years before Oistrakh’s death, in 1974, we don’t have as many recorded performances, but we have the rather significant recordings of both the official premiere (preceded by a few “unofficial” performances) and the Western premiere from London, a concert under Eugene Ormandy apparently organised at short notice. And for the really keen, it’s worth seeking out Bruno Monsaingeon’s documentary David Oistrakh: Artist of the People?, which includes a remarkable phone conversation following the first performance between Oistrakh and Shostakovich, in which the composer comments “it’s as though I was playing it myself!” 

October 26th(?) 1967 – Film of the first official performance, with Kirill Kondrashin and the Moscow Philharmonic (available on DVD from VAI)

November 19th1967 – First performance in the West, with Eugene Ormandy and the LSO at the Royal Albert Hall (BBC Legends CD)

August 22nd 1968 – Live Proms performance with Evgeny Stetlanov and the USSR State Symphony Orchestra (BBC Legends CD with 1962 Edinburgh 1^st Concerto)

September 27th 1968 – Live performance with Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the Moscow Philharmonic (Released a few times by Brilliant Classics)

Violin Sonata in G major, Op 134 (1968)

Oistrakh’s actual 60^th birthday was marked with the terse sonata and, remarkably enough, a recording exists of Shostakovich and him playing the piece in the composer’s home. Oistrakh then made the piece a part of the recital repertoire he played with Sviatoslav Richter, another remarkable Soviet musician, but one with a more distant relationship with Shostakovich.

December 1968 – DO and Dmitri Shostakovich at the composer’s home

May 3rd 1969 – World premiere performance in Moscow with Sviatoslav Richter (issued by Melodiya)

Oistrakh Hunting Season

Classical music seems simultaneously very good and very bad at documenting itself. You want David Oistrakh playing the Brahms Concerto? Count the ways. You want a definitive list of his recordings, studio and live? Forget it. For this is the frustration of one caught, as I am, in the grip of an Oistrakh-hunting obsession: clues and signs and no definitive answers to exactly what he played and quite when he played it.

More specifically, I’m trying to ascertain just how many Oistrakh performances of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto are out there, on the way to writing something about the performance history of this piece. Shostakovich wrote the piece with Oistrakh in mind in 1948; indeed, it was while writing the concerto that the composer was denounced at a meeting of the Union of Soviet Composers. Shostakovich tucked it away and waited for a better climate, which came, in 1955, as the cultural thaw was beginning in the wake of Stalin’s death. Shostakovich conceded to a few alterations suggested by Oistrakh, and the concerto was premiered in October 1955 with the Leningrad Philharmonic under Mravinsky. As far as I can tell, the first recorded performance seems to have been a tape of an early concert in New York with the NYPO and Dmitri Mitropoulos on New Year’s Day 1956, the day before the concerto’s first studio session. The studio recording has been rereleased a number of times, most recently by Sony, but the live broadcast seems only to have been released in an expensive box of NYPO broadcasts which, while I’m very interested to hear, I’m not £100 of interested.

Then there’s a 1956 live concert tape from Vienna published a few years ago by Orfeo, followed by a more familiar studio recording with the Leningraders and Mravinsky at the end of the year. Mravinsky and Oistrakh then appeared at the 1957 Prague Spring Festival, this time with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra (a rare away match for Mra). We then jump to Edinburgh in 1962 for a live recording with Rozhdestvensky, which has been widely available for years via BBC Legends. I recently found a filmed performance from 1967 with the unexpected accompaniment of Heinz Fricke and the Staatskapelle Berlin. And then it’s to 1972 for Oistrakh’s final recorded performances of the piece – apparently a concert with Maxim Shostakovich and the New Philharmonia and a subsequent and easily available studio version with the same team, via EMI.

All in, if these performances all really exist, that’s nine recorded performances of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto by David Oistrakh:

January 1^st 1956 – Live performance with NYPO and Mitropoulos (Released in a 10CD set from the orchestra’s own label)

January 1956 – Studio performance with NYPO and Mitropoulos (Originally Columbia and subsequently Sony CD)

June 21^st 1956 – Live from Vienna with Leningrad PO and Mravinsky (Orfeo CD)

November 1956 – Studio with Leningrad PO and Mravinsky (presumably Melodiya; republished a number of times by Brilliant Classics on CD)

1957 – Live from Prague with Czech Philharmonic and Mravinsky (released by Praga on CD in the 1990s)

September 7th 1962 – Live from Edinburgh withPhilharmonia and Rozhdestvensky (BBC Legends CD)

1967 – Video from Berlin with the Staatskapelle Berlinand Heinz Fricke

1972 – Live with New Philharmonia and Maxim Shostakovich (mentioned in this review)

1972 – Studio performance with New Philharmonia and Maxim Shostakovich (EMI)

The only one I’m dubious about is the first from 1972, as I’ve not seen any reference to any release. I’m quite sure there must be more broadcast performances tucked away in archives and it seems very likely that the 1955 premiere performance was taped, but what we have represents a remarkable record of the evolution of a performer’s way with one of the great concertos of the century. If you know any more, or can shed light on that 1972 live performance, leave a comment below.