Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony no. 1, opus 10, continued
__________
for Barbara, who died recently,
she would’ve loved this
Shostakovich was just nineteen when
his Symphony No.1, opus 10 was
first performed – it had been his
graduation piece the previous year
from the Petrograd Conservatory –
by, then, which is to say 1926, the
Leningrad Philharmonic, renamed the
Saint Petersburg after the fall of the
U.S.S.R., the name it had held before
the Bolshevik Revolution, the oldest
philharmonic orchestra, therefore,
incidentally, in our Russia, going
back to 1882
the work was a complete success, not
surprisingly, if you’ll consider its scope,
its power, and its novel musical
interpolations, I mean a piano as an
integral orchestral instrument rather
than as a distinct, however interrelated,
component, a pas de 40 instead of a
pas de deux, something I can’t remember
anywhere else having seen for piano
not to mention the drum roll between
the last two movements, drums making
a splash in an orchestral setting, who’d
‘a’ thunk it, though Richard Strauss had
done just that in his extraordinary
“Burleske” several decades earlier,
another youthful work, Strauss only 21
but meanwhile back in Russia, before
I too seriously digress, Shostakovich
was immediately compared to another
earlier young prodigy there, Alexander
Glazunov, who’d himself put out his
own First Symphony, the “Slavonic“,
at age 16, introducing, incidentally, his
own instrumental novelty then, an oboe
obbligato, which by very definition is
lovely
Glazunov also mentored, by the way,
Shostakovich at the Petrograd, proved
to be instrumental indeed in his
progress
it’s interesting to put these last two
together, to compare, the Glazunov, 1881,
follows the traditional Romantic
imperatives, tempo, tonality and
repetition, but with more bombast, to my
mind, than its European counterparts,
its fields are the Russian steppes with
troikas, horse-drawn carriages, flying
across vast unhampered vistas of the
Russian snow-covered, therefore
pristine, tundra, to whet the unbridled
Russian spirit, the Europeans, Brahms,
Mendelssohn, Mahler, conversely,
are confined to the hunt, however ever
glorious, but with shrubs, copses,
thickets, if not veritable forests, to blur
the sonic arena, inspire dreams,
consequently, less far-reaching than
those of Johnny Appleseed even, of
the North American Prairies poets,
their own far-flung, boundless
imaginations, inspiration, you can
hear it all, blatantly, in the resonance
of the horns
you’ll note the movements follow
essentially the same rhythmic order
in either symphony, the first two fast
enough, then a third that’s somewhat
slower, a variation from the strictly
Classical order of fast, slow, fast, then
a last, eclectic, movement
but Shostakovich is more atonal,
melodically divergent, an eccentricity
he’ll later polish to a degree of
politically subversive brilliance
for not submitting, however, to the rule
of repetition, which is manifest, though,
in Glazunov, Shostakovich, I find, leaves
us trying to find our bearings as his music
rolls along, kind of like in biographical
movies, when you start looking at your
watch to determine how many life
incidents remain in this particular,
however significant, existential drama
as spectacle – and it must be noted that
symphonic displays were at the time
indeed spectacles – there was no
phonographic, photographic
equipment to transmit such
experiences, the symphony itself was
the show, it had, right there, itself, to
wow the audience
in all of these cases, all of them did
Shostakovich, however, of all of them
remained eventually potently
pertinent, powerfully paramount,
watch
R ! chard
.jpg!Large.jpg "The Scream, 1893 - Edvard Munch")
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