Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.classica
Titolo: segnalazione 1 (Shostakovich)

 
          Lunedě 19 settembre su Radio3
http://www.radio.rai.it/radio3/cartellone/mostra_evento.cfm?Q_EV_ID=143599
Panna
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
http://arianna.libero.it/usenet/

Grazie Panna per le segnalazioni!!! (tutte e due). Schostakovich mi
sembra molto interessante, non lo conosco per niente, ma Quasthoff è
una garanzia!
Cosa mi dici dell'opera?
Baci,
Lulu

 Lulu


 Lulu


Cosa mi dici dell'opera?
"In 1969 Shostakovich stated in a Pravda interview, interlarded with the
usual political phrases, that he had had ideas in mind for the Fourteenth
Symphony, Op. 135 since 1962. I orchestrated Mussorgsky's vocal cycle "Songs
and Dances of Death", a magnificent work ... Perhaps one should take one's
courage in one's hands and try to continue the cycle, I thought ... I was
staggered at the depth, wisdom and artistic expressive power with which the
'eternal subjects' of love, life and death are treated, although I approach
these subjects differently in my symphony. Shostakovich cast his symphony,
dedicated to Benjamin Britten, as an eleven-part vocal cycle concentrating
on the subject of death by means of poems by F. G. Lorca (2), G. Apollinaire
(7), W. Küchelbecker (1) and R. M. Rilke (2). The instrumentation is unusual
and untypical for Shostakovich up to that time: there are no winds; next to
a small string orchestra is a group containing percussion instruments that
had either never been used by Shostakovich before (vibraphone) or had been
infrequently used in general. Some movements are even determined by the
sound of percussion, in the literal sense of the word "beating". In the
fifth part there is a refrain-like return of a fanfare-like twelve-note
melody in the xylo-phone, not ritually used as in Schönberg, but rather
intuitively in the sense of Adorno's statement that "de- ceased bones make
the most colourful music". In the wild orchestral postlude of the macabre
"Malaguena" the effect of the percussion is atmospheric, in that castanets
portray Death dancing in the tavern. Claves make a ghostly effect in the
prison scene of the seventh song: the unbearable waiting for one's own
execution is intensified by special effects in the strings (pizzicati and
strings struck by the wood of the bow). Two loud bell strokes interrupt the
calls with which the knight warns the blonde witch in "Lorelei"; soft bells,
together with vibraphone and celesta, announce the arrival of the lover and
the death of Lorelei. Again by means of two chime strokes a moment of frenzy
breaks through in 'Suicide', before the movement sinks into the desolation
of the opening."
http://www.geocities.com/kuala_bear/articles/sikorski.html
"Two historic concert recordings--the surprise being that the more
compelling turns out not to be that of the première of the Blok cycle in
Moscow on 27th October 1967, but rather a live performance of the Fourteenth
Symphony taped, presumably in Moscow, on 12th February 1973. The Blok
première is, of course, of innate interest; yet the reading, while
possessing the customary intensity of Shostakovich première recordings, is
marred by tape deterioration and one of Vishnevskaya's squallier
performances. In the Fourteenth, though, she is magnificent: more accurate
than in Russian Disc's otherwise immensely gripping Moscow première
recording from 29th December 1969 (RDCD 11192) and even more deeply involved
in the meaning of the work. Taking into account the atmospheric interference
that affects the Russian Disc recording, this Revelation issue, which uses
the same forces as at the première but with Rostropovich in place of Barshai
on the podium, is arguably preferable.
The Fourteenth Symphony is always a lacerating experience, but this
performance is particularly concentrated and ferocious. This mood was almost
certainly a by-product of events leading up to the time of the concert, an
ominous period of freshly gathering repression in which Brezhnev's KGB were
closing in on Solzhenitsyn, with whom Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich had been
publicly identified since inviting the persecuted writer to move into their
dacha with them in 1969. Such a noble gesture carried frightful risk and
consequently brought with it an additional burden of fear for Vishnevskaya
and her husband. In her remarkable memoir, Galina (Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1984), she records David Oistrakh's reaction upon learning that
his friends had given Solzhenitsyn sanctuary:
  "I won't play the hypocrite with you: I would never have taken him in. To
tell the truth, I'm afraid. My wife and I lived through '37, when night
after night every person in Moscow feared his arrest. In our building, only
our apartment and the one facing it on the same floor survived the arrests.
All the other tenants had been taken off to God knows where. Every night I
expected the worst, and I set aside some warm underwear and a bit of food
for the inevitable moment. You can't imagine what we went through, listening
for the fatal knock on the door or the sound of a car pulling up. One night
a Black Maria stopped out in front. Who were they coming for? Us or the
neighbours? The downstairs door slammed and the elevator began its ascent.
Finally it stopped on our floor. We listened to the footsteps, and went
numb. Whose door would they come to? An eternity passed. Then we heard them
ring at the apartment across from us. Since that moment, I have known I'm
not a fighter..."
Vishnevskaya, Rostropovich, and Solzhenitsyn were definitely fighters.
During the four years that Solzhenitsyn worked in the guesthouse at their
dacha, they were forced to endure an increasing number of petty restrictions
by the Soviet authorities and became used to being openly spied on by the
KGB, which had set up an observation post on the nearby road. A year after
the performance of the Fourteenth Symphony preserved on this disc,
Solzhenitsyn was thrown out of the USSR for "treasonably" publishing The
Gulag Archipelago abroad. Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich, goaded by vengeful
official cancellations and obstructions, reluctantly followed him into
Western exile some months later. They were under siege when they made this
recording--a fact which goes far towards explaining the intensity of feeling
contained in it.
Why, though, should such feeling have expressed itself via what many hold to
be one of Shostakovich's least "political" symphonies?--a work, indeed,
ostensibly, and only, about death. In fact, as anyone who examines the
libretto will see (and as becomes blindingly clear from this performance),
the Fourteenth is actually one of Shostakovich's most political
symphonies--a very personal expression of moral outrage against the
spiritual imprisonment of life in the USSR at the time it was composed and
of which he by then had over fifty years of bitter experience.
The English composer and musicologist Gerard McBurney made the case for the
moral/political message of the Fourteenth Symphony in a talk called "Marking
the Graves" which he gave on BBC Radio 3 during February 1993. Lorca's De
Profundis [I], he pointed out, speaks of "a hundred fervent lovers [who]
fell into eternal sleep beneath the dry soil". In the Russia of 1969, this
would naturally have been taken as an allusion to the mass-graves of
Stalin's victims which surrounded the country's cities. "Here crosses will
be erected," the text continues, "so that the people will not forget them."
Preludially preceding the rest of the symphony and reprised in the work's
penultimate section, the cold high strains of this music speak of isolation
and incarceration of a kind at once literal and metaphorical.
In II (Malagueña)--musically derived from the scherzo of Moisei Vainberg's
Sixth Symphony (a work which commemorates the Jewish victims of
Nazism)--death "stalks in and out of the tavern" with a repetitive
methodical briskness suggesting that of the NKVD at the height of Stalin's
purges, as recalled by David Oistrakh. In III, Apollinaire's Lorelei laments
that, like those sent to the Gulag or into internal exile, her lover "has
gone, he is in a distant country... nothing pleases me, darkness fills my
heart". The agony of separation which drives Lorelei gradually towards
suicide was the common lot of countless Soviet women, their husbands taken
from them and transported to faraway places, rarely to be allowed contact
even by letter and often never to meet again. Lorelei's suicide, made
explicit in IV, directly reflects the composer's suicidal impulses
throughout his life, particularly during periods of persecution. "I
remember," writes Vishnevskaya of the rehearsals in 1969, "with what deep
self-absorption, with what apparent agony, Dmitri Dmitriyevich listened to
the words 'Three lilies, three lilies on my grave without a cross...'" In
this performance, the composer's anguish is searingly conveyed by
Vishnevskaya in the climactic passage on the lines "the [second lily] grows
from my heart which suffers so/Upon a verminous bed; the third one's roots
lacerate my mouth". Implied: the verminous bed of Soviet "culture"; the
mouth-lacerating disgust of self-traducing words uttered under duress.
The remainder of the symphony is increasingly personal, and only obliquely
about the supposed central subject of death. In V (On Watch), Shostakovich
turns to the theme of vigil, which, in his case as in countless others',
took the form of waiting sleeplessly through the night for the dreaded knock
of the Soviet secret police. VI (Madame, Look!) deals with the demoralising
effect of such sustained experiences of stress and fear: heartless cynicism
becomes a refuge in a society in which love is so hideously vulnerable to
violence, separation, and death. While this was an experience shared by
millions of his fellow citizens, Shostakovich felt it with particular
intensity in that his social conscience detested cynicism, as he emphasises
in Testimony. In Vishnevskaya's riveting performance, the ghastly laughter
of the protagonist veers from sickening scorn to self-contemptuous
revulsion. From this point in the work, she falls silent until the end. The
music now darkens even deeper.
Since the external repression of Communism generated an additional dimension
of necessary self-repression, Shostakovich, as so many like him, became his
own jailer. Hence VII deals with imprisonment both naturalistically and as a
psychological condition. (That Shostakovich felt almost literally imprisoned
by his predicament has been confirmed by several who knew him in later
years, and is explicitly encoded in the opening of the fourth movement of
his Eighth Quartet.) The composer's repressed indignation--and the
subterranean scheme of the entire symphony--erupts into the open in VIII,
The Zaporozhian Cossacks' Answer to the Sultan of Constantinople, which,
railing against tyranny, has nothing whatever to do with the work's
advertised subject. Section IX (O Delvig, Delvig!) sets a poem by the only
Russian included in this collection: an obscure lament for a fellow poet
imprisoned under the regime of Alexander I. Here, as in his Tsvetayeva and
Michelangelo cycles, the composer vents his anger over the repression of the
creative conscience under totalitarianism. In X (The Death of the Poet),
Shostakovich pursues an ongoing exposition of his personal predicament ("How
can they understand how long this road is?") before returning to a more
coldly objective stance in the symphony's grim Conclusion. The work's real
subjects--isolation, repression, and the experience of imprisonment--become
concealed again in its final section, yet they are unignorably dominant
throughout most of the score.
All things considered, it's hardly surprising that the Fourteenth Symphony
should have called forth such blazing commitment from its performers during
the nadir of the Brezhnev freeze."
http://www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/discrev/shos14.html
testi: 
http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/Strasse/9570/shostakovich/135.html
Per quel che mi riguarda... tempo fa, avevo ascoltato i Canti e Danze della
morte" di Mussorgsky orchestrati da Shostakovich nella splendida esecuzione
di Sergei Aleksashkin con Solti. Alla fine, ricordo di aver pensato che era
musica talmente bella, e che Shostakovich difficilmente avrebbe potuto
comporre qualcosa di simile. Allora misi nel lettore la Sinfonia n.14 nella
esecuzione di Barshai con Vladimir Vaneev e Alla Simoni (tratta
dall'integrale della Brilliant). Dalle prime note scende una tale
desolazione, così diversa da Mussorgsky... ecco, Shostakovich era riuscito a
comporre qualcosa di diverso, e di altrettanto grande (ascolta "Tri lilii").
Ciao    Mr Duffy (grazie per tutti i complimenti, eh ;)

Grazie! Adesso sono presa male e non ho tempo di leggere con
attenzione, ma archivio e metto da parte per giorni meno impegnati!!!
Ma sai, Mr Duffy, che stai diventando il mio Caronte verso i lidi
Schostakovich-iosi?!
Baci,
Lulu

Lulu

Caron dimonio, con occhi di bragia...
(mi fa pensare a)
Vanne; la tua meta è Giaveno.
Ti guida il tuo dimone, e il tuo dimon son io
(parafrasi sull'Otello)
(poi Dante continua)
Come d'autunno si levan le foglie
l'una appresso de l'altra, fin che 'l ramo
vede a la terra tutte le sue spoglie
(e quindi)
Auf der Strasse steht ein Lindenbaum,
da hab'  ich zum erstenmal im Schlaf geruht.
Unter dem Lindenbaum, der hat seine Blüten
über mich geschneit, da wusst'  ich nicht
wie das Leben tut, war alles, ach, alles wieder gut!
Alles! Alles! Lieb'  und Leid,
und Welt, und Traum!
(Lungo la strada, un tiglio si leva:
là finalmente, in sonno riposai.
Sotto il tiglio, che fiori come neve
su me versava, io dimenticai
come la vita fa male, e tutto fu di nuovo
bello! tutto! l'amore e la pena
e il mondo e il sogno!)
(e...)
Ich leb' allein in meinem Himmel,
In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied!
(Nell'alto del mio cielo vivo solo,
nel mio amore, nel mio canto io riposo.)
(un Caronte moderno, che distribuisce depliant in inglese, ecco cosa sono :)
scusa la divagazione!     Mr Duffy

 comporre qualcosa di diverso, e di altrettanto grande (ascolta "Tri
lilii").
Be' Tutto č molto piů semplice in Musorgskij, e non c'č un retroterra cosě
tragico.
Ciao
