Dayton Philharmonic - Shostakovich: The Witness
The unique Classical Connections format features musical examples and explanation by DPO Artistic Director Neal Gittleman followed by a performance on the second half of the entire composition.
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Dayton Philharmonic - Shostakovich: The Witness
The unique Classical Connections format features musical examples and explanation by DPO Artistic Director Neal Gittleman followed by a performance on the second half of the entire composition.
Directly following is a casual Q&A with Neal and an Ice Cream Social with a free scoop of Graeter's.
When Dmitri Shostakovich decided to write a large symphony in which he could make fun of the recently deceased Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, he was able to do so only because the stringent policies Stalin had in place censuring Soviet composers for writing music the official censors termed formalistic (read cynical, dissonant, negative) had loosened. For example, when Shostakovich had written his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in the 1930s, Stalin had ordered the official communist party, state-owned newspaper Pravda (which, interestingly, means truth in Russian) to print an editorial entitled "Muddle Instead of Music," decrying Shostakovich’s work. Unflappable, Shostakovich completed his Symphony No. 4 but threw it in a drawer until after Stalin’s passing. Now that Stalin was gone and Shostakovich could move around a bit better politically, Shostakovich wrote his Tenth Symphony, featuring in its allegro section music that is at once Russian, powerful, furious, grim, antagonistic, menacing, and intimidating. Guess which historical figure the music describes?
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