Wednesday @ 11 AM Intermezzo host Chris Wolf will have Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 in full and on Thursday tune in @ 2PM to hear the opening movement of Symphony No. 8 in the Diamond Lane.

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union reeled under the purges of Joseph Stalin. Every person knew the terror of losing a family member to the gulag, or to a death sentence. Official government decrees defined truth and beauty. Traditional composers were declared decadent and their music forbidden. Only Beethoven survived the ban.

In this environment Dmitri Shostakovich, the greatest Soviet composer, found himself heavily scrutinized.

Shostakovich was only 26 when he completed Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934). The opera featured a racy plot set to avant-garde music and premiered to critical and popular acclaim. Two years later, three different productions were running in Moscow.

Then Stalin himself went to a performance. The next morning the state newspaper Pravda condemned the work, saying it corrupted the Soviet spirit. The opera disappeared overnight and every publication and political organization in the country heaped personal attacks on its composer.

Shostakovich lived in fear, sleeping in the stairwell outside his apartment to spare his family the experience of his imminent arrest.

Unsure about its reception, Shostakovich rejected his own Fourth Symphony while in rehearsal. Instead he premiered Symphony No. 5, obsequiously subtitled "A Soviet Artist's Response to Just Criticism." As required, the work displayed lyricism, a heroic tone and inspiration from Russian literature. Still, many hear a subtext of critical despair beneath the crowd-pleasing melodies.

Stalin found the politics of the music acceptable and Shostakovich won a reprieve – at least for another decade.

 

Stokowski conducted Shostakovich's 5th Symphony many times over the years, including a 1961 Edinburgh Festival performance with the London Symphony Orchestra in the Usher Hall (pictured in the video). We hear the 2nd movement Scherzo ('Allegretto')

Tune in Wednesday morning at 11 AM for a full performance of the 5th symphony recorded by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Andris Nelsons is the conductor.

Read more about Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony here, including a movement by movement break down.

 

On Thursday afternoon @ 2 PM, Diamond Lane host Sarah Jo Kirsch will have the opening movement of Shostakovich 's Symphony No. 8.

A profoundly personal statement on the tragedy of war, Dmitry Shostakovich's dark Symphony No. 8 (1943) was his elegiac follow-up to the heroic Symphony No. 7, "Leningrad."

In a letter to his friend Isaak Glikman, the composer parodied the response he expected from the government:

"I am sure that it will give rise to valuable critical observations which will both inspire me to future creative work and provide insights enabling me to review that which I have created in the past. Rather than take a step backward I shall thus succeed in taking one forward."

It was indeed not well received, although reviews were tepid rather than scathing. The bleak tone, and in particular the lack of an optimistic conclusion, made it unsuitable as propaganda at home or abroad. Shostakovich's friend Ivan Sollertinsky noted that, "the music is significantly tougher and more astringent than the Fifth or the Seventh and for that reason is unlikely to become popular".

The government responded by giving it the subtitle the Stalingrad Symphony and portraying it as a memorial to those killed in that battle. The symphony was criticised by Prokofiev and others at a Composers' Plenum in March 1944, and after the Zhdanov decree of 1948 it was effectively banned until eight years later. The symphony was rehabilitated in October 1956, in a performance by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Samuil Samosud.

It was introduced to the western hemisphere during World War II by CBS correspondent Bill Downs, who returned from the Moscow bureau to the United States with the score.

 

 

Sources: http://www.pbs.org/keepingscore/shostakovich-symphony-5.html

                http://www.allmusic.com/album/shostakovich-symphony-no-8-mw0001859361

                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._8_(Shostakovich)