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Beyond the Score®: Shostakovich's Fourth – Is CLASSICAL SERIES BEYOND THE SCORE®: SHOSTAKOVICH’S FOURTH – IS MUSIC DANGEROUS? FRIDAY & SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 & 28, AT 8 PM NASHVILLE SYMPHONY GIANCARLO GUERRERO, conductor Beyond the Score® A multimedia exploration of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4 – INTERMISSION – DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 4, in C major, Op. 43 - 60 minutes I. Allegretto poco moderato - Presto II. Moderato con moto III. Largo - Allegro This presentation will last 2 hours and 15 minutes, including a 20-minute intermission. Beyond the Score® is a production of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Gerald McBurney, Creative Director for Beyond the Score® PROGRAM SUMMARY It’s no exaggeration to say that Dmitri Shostakovich’s choices as a composer were a matter of life or death. Just when he was completing his Fourth Symphony, Stalin expressed his displeasure with the direction the composer’s music was taking. The Fourth is one of his most daring and adventurous scores, drawing on inspiration from Mahler. Shostakovich realized that it could further endanger his already precarious situation, so he withdrew it at the last minute — even while it was under rehearsal. Cast in three movements — two enormous ones surrounding a shorter one — the Fourth still shocks today with its fierce power and bleak honesty, and is written for the largest orchestra Shostakovich used in any of his 15 symphonies. 34 SEPTEMBER 2019 CLASSICAL DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Op. 43 Born on September 25, 1906, First performance: in Saint Petersburg, Russia December 30, 1961, with Kirill Kondrashin conducting Died on August 9, 1975, the Moscow Philharmonic in Moscow First Nashville Symphony Estimated performance: Composed: length: These are the orchestra’s 1935 - 36 60 minutes fi rst performances. “ rom the start, the listener is shocked own career — and, had he been less lucky, Fby deliberate dissonance, a confused even his life. wash of sound. Fragments of melody…are This was the era of the Stalinist purges, drowned out…and disappear in a grinding, when artists and intellectuals were among squealing roar.” Th is put-down appeared in the prime victims of the eff ort to police what the January 28, 1936, edition of Pravda, the Orwell would famously dub thoughtcrime. offi cial Communist Party newspaper of the Shostakovich might well have suff ered the Soviet Union. fate of many a fellow artist by being sent off to Th e target of the article’s attack was none the gulag. Even music critics found themselves other than Dmitri Shostakovich, a wildly in trouble. As noted by the biographer Laurel gift ed and decidedly self-assured composer, Fay, the circle of opinion makers “who had not quite 30, who had wowed the international praised and encouraged [Shostakovich] to scene with his First Symphony (written while pursue his incorrect path” also faced grave he was still a teenager). His opera Lady consequences with the crackdown. Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had become To survive this crisis, Shostakovich had a runaway hit in both Moscow and Leningrad. to reevaluate how he was presenting himself Something about Shostakovich’s treatment to the public. He succeeded in winning a of this story of adulterous lust and murder dramatic reprieve from the offi cial tastemakers — hardly novel for the opera stage — irked with the triumphant premiere of his Fifth Stalin, who came to a performance some Symphony in November 1937. But the danger two years aft er its premiere and, ominously, of making a false step remained throughout left early. his career, and after being lionized as a Th e unsigned article against Shostakovich, public hero, Shostakovich once again faced titled “Muddle Instead of Music,” declared condemnation in the late 1940s. him to be an example of a “dangerous trend” Arguably the most ambitiously experimental in Soviet music, one “distorting” the ideals of his symphonies, the Fourth had been of true Socialism and “tickling the perverted “disappeared” before the historic premiere taste of the bourgeois with the fidgety, of the Fift h — like one of those airbrushed neurotic” strains of his opera. But in reality, photos erasing an objectionable fi gure and what was endangered was Shostakovich’s documenting the approved Soviet version INCONCERT 35 CLASSICAL of history. By the time the Pravda attack was of his longest (surpassed only by the popular launched, Shostakovich had already written “Leningrad” Seventh Symphony), it calls the bulk of the Fourth Symphony. He pressed for the most expanded orchestra of the on, not yet fully aware of the implications of Shostakovich symphonies, including 20 this official criticism, though, as Fay reports, woodwinds alone. The Fourth is cast in three the composer soon saw one practical result in movements, with a relatively brief middle the sharp decline of his income — commissions movement that functions as a combination dried up rapidly. of interlude and scherzo between the furious After completing the score in the spring energy and invention of the far vaster of 1936, Shostakovich played the Fourth outer movements. Symphony at home on the piano for a group In his breakthrough First Symphony, of distinguished musical guests (on the day Shostakovich had already shown a powerful his first child — daughter Galina — was attraction to the then-unfashionable music born). The new piece was scheduled to be of Gustav Mahler. He described the Fourth unveiled in December 1936, but by that point as a “credo” and “a monumental, programmatic Shostakovich had grown nervous about the piece of great ideas and great passions.” One reception it would receive; the music, he of these “great ideas” involves the inclusive realized, dangerously pushed the envelope. perspective of Mahler, who opened up The musicians had already been rehearsing the discourse of the symphony to include this challenging score, but at the last minute marches, grotesque soundscapes and relics an official press release announced that the of the “everyday world” — a Shakespearean composer opted to withdraw the piece “on spectrum of humanity. And all of this can the grounds that it in no way corresponds to be found not only in the Fourth Symphony, his current creative convictions and represents but across Shostakovich’s body of a long-outdated phase.” symphonic works. Varying accounts of what really happened have been put forward, but Fay concludes that “given the political and aesthetic climate WHAT TO LISTEN FOR of the time, there seems very little doubt that even in a flawless performance the he enormous first movement follows massive…work would have been construed Ta uniquely reoriented, loose version as…an act in arrogant defiance of the Party’s of classical sonata form, with a good deal benevolent guidance.” of “space” devoted to passages that freely Although a two-piano version was develop the main ideas and link them together. introduced in 1945, the world premiere of Listening to the result can resemble a trip the Fourth Symphony was delayed until through a maze, where the path we think we’ve well after Stalin’s death and took place on been following leads somewhere unexpected. December 30, 1961, in Moscow. Still far less A starkly compressed reprise reintroduces frequently heard than the Fifth, which has the main themes in reverse order, after a become a concert hall staple, the Fourth thus sprawling exposition and development of fills a troubling gap in the complete cycle of these themes. The latter section includes a Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies. thrilling, cyclone-like passage for the strings Indeed, the Fourth Symphony is a contender and a massing of brass and percussion for Shostakovich’s most original — perhaps sonorities that drives forward with furious even his most profound — symphony. One momentum, culminating in a savagely 36 SEPTEMBER 2019 CLASSICAL dissonant climax. Shostakovich asks the humor. Shostakovich’s irony reaches its peak musicians to dial the volume up to an in the strange vanishing point of the Fourth’s extreme level. ending. It’s no wonder he decided to withdraw The much briefer second movement deals the score: it challenged the official Soviet in a basic contrast of ideas — one of which, narrative of optimistic progress. ironically, would morph into a key idea of the Fifth Symphony. It comes to a close with The Symphony No. 4 is scored for 2 piccolos, enigmatically ticking gestures that also occur 4 flutes, 4 oboes (4th doubling English horn), 4 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, in later Shostakovich scores. 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 8 horns, 4 trumpets, The third and last movement moves from 3 trombones, 2 tubas, 2 timpanists, percussion a slow funeral march of the sort familiar (xylophone, glockenspiel, triangle, castanets, from Mahler’s symphonies into a fast-paced gong, cymbals, snare drum, wood block, and bass section that plays off shockingly abrupt drum), celesta, 2 harps and strings. contrasts. A brutal kind of humor results — — Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony’s and totalitarianism in any form maintains program annotator. an unyieldingly hostile attitude towards ABOUT BEYOND THE SCORE® A PRODUCTION OF THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Gerard McBurney, creative director or newcomers to classical music and time concertgoers as well as to encourage F longtime aficionados alike, each an active, more fulfilling way of listening Beyond the Score® presentation is a dramatic for seasoned audiences. At its core is the exploration of a composer’s music. Through live format of musical extracts, spoken live actors, stunning visual projections clarification, theatrical narrative and hand- and virtuosic fragments of live music, the paced projections on large central surfaces, compelling story of the composer’s life and performed in close synchrony. After each art unfolds, illuminating the world that shaped program, audiences return from intermission the music’s creation. Under creative director to experience the resulting work performed Gerard McBurney’s leadership, each of the in a regular concert setting, equipped with a 30 Beyond the Score presentations weave new understanding of its style and genesis.
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