{"id":471,"date":"2012-11-08T00:13:26","date_gmt":"2012-11-08T05:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=471"},"modified":"2012-11-08T00:13:26","modified_gmt":"2012-11-08T05:13:26","slug":"interpreting-shostakovich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2012\/11\/interpreting-shostakovich.html","title":{"rendered":"Interpreting Shostakovich"},"content":{"rendered":"

PostClassical Ensemble\u2019s month-long \u201cInterpreting Shostakovich\u201d festival, in DC, began with a screening of Grigori Kozintsev\u2019s 1970 film version of King Lear<\/em>, with music by Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak\u2019s Shakespeare translation. If ever there was a film that cannot be viewed at home in TV, this is it. On the wide screen of the National Gallery of Art\u2019s film auditorium, and a superb sound system, Kozinstev\u2019s Lear was the most powerful Shakespeare experience I can recall, on stage or screen. <\/p>\n

In the course of a long and interesting post-film discussion, an audience member praised Kozintsev for his fidelity to Shakespeare. But I do not find the film Shakespearean. Mussorgsky\u2019s Boris Godunov <\/em>is an obvious point of inspiration. Like Boris, the Kozintsev Lear<\/em> is in equal measure personal and epic. Lear himself \u2013 his repentance, sorrow, and death — is Boris. Mussorgsky\u2019s truth-telling Holy Fool is Lear\u2019s Fool. But Shakespeare\u2019s play contains nothing like the film\u2019s vast wastelands \u2013 rock and dirt and sullen skies \u2013 or its huddled or processional human hordes, a complex mass protagonist at once powerful, dangerous, and pathetic. No less than Mussorgsky, Shostakovich underlines the magnitude of the terrain and its strewn inhabitants. Serendipitously, late Shakespeare here mates with late Shostakovich: a musical idiom as spare and dissonant as the imagery and action at hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cShostakovich and film\u201d was one focus of our festival. Its featured participants included the Shostakovich scholar Solomon Volkov, who in his book Shostakovich and Stalin<\/em> explores the Soviet dictator\u2019s hands-on management of Soviet film, and speculates that Shostakovich\u2019s usefulness as a film composer insured his survival. The festival booklet included a seminal essay, by Peter Rollberg and Roy Guenther (both of George Washington University), arguing the importance of Shostakovich\u2019s film scores as a fresh and vital topic, notwithstanding the composer\u2019s own denigration of this component of his creative output. <\/p>\n

The National Gallery of Art showed three other Shostakovich-scored films, including \u2013 at the opposite extreme from Lear \u2013 Joris Ivens\u2019 1954 documentary Song of the Rivers<\/em>, in which workers of the world unite for more than 90 minutes. Shostakovich\u2019s potboiler music includes a proletarian song (words by Bertolt Brecht) in the style of Eisler, performed by Paul Robeson. <\/p>\n

We also showed Tony Palmer\u2019s 1988 film adaptation of Volkov\u2019s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri <\/em>Shostakovich<\/em>, starring Ben Kingsley as the harrowed composer. Both Palmer and Volkov were on hand to comment. The film concludes with a fantasy: Stalin posthumously visits the dying Shostakovich and claims, \u201cyou needed me.\u201d Shostakovich, in the book Testimony<\/em>, admits no such thing; he treats Stalin with hatred and contempt as a bloodthirsty philistine. But Volkov agrees with Palmer\u2019s Stalin. Stalin, in Volkov\u2019s view, was a master propagandist who stage-managed the sensational success of Shostakovich\u2019s Leningrad<\/em> Symphony in the West.<\/p>\n

The festival\u2019s music was supplied by violinist Dmitri Berlinski, the cellist Andrei Tchekmazov, the pianist George Vatchnadze, and PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez. Rudolf Barshai\u2019s string orchestra transcription of Shostakovich\u2019s Eighth String Quartet was unforgettably reshaped by Gil-Ordonez as a Brucknerian essay in sorrowful breadth and repose \u2013 a reading in which the Washington Post\u2019<\/em>s Stephen Brookes plausibly found \u201cunearthly luminosity.\u201d<\/p>\n

An ongoing debate, permeating the festival, questioned whether such iconic Shostakovich creations as the Eighth Quartet are necessarily to be understood and experienced in the context of the Stalinist conditions that imposed their morbidity. I am old enough to remember a time when Shostakovich was widely perceived in the West as a composer whose precocious genius was distorted and diluted by Soviet aesthetic dictates. (The New York Times<\/em> obituary called him a loyal Communist.) After that, conventional wisdom \u2013 influenced by Testimony <\/em>\u2013 shifted toward an appreciation of Shostakovich as a subversive chronicler of Soviet suffering, an ironist whose double meanings were endlessly exhumed. In Volkov\u2019s view, such readings as Gil-Ordonez\u2019s in DC (which he called \u201cbetter than Barshai\u201d) suggest a new chapter in Shostakovich reception history, canonizing the composer with scant lingering regard for the political circumstances shadowing his odyssey. <\/p>\n

In any event, three decades after Shostakovich\u2019s death, his music continues to resonate disturbingly. Pertinent, it seems to me, is Shostakovich\u2019s discomfort (in Testimony<\/em>) with a Stravinsky \u201cpersonality flaw\u201d \u2013 that he \u201calways spoke only for himself.\u201d Shostakovich also says, in Testimony<\/em>: \u201cMeaning in music \u2013 that must sound very strange for most people. . . . What was the composer trying to say? . . . The questions are na\u00efve, of course, but despite their naivete and crudity, they definitely merit being asked. And I would add to them, for instance: Can music attack evil? Can it make man stop and think? Can it cry out and thereby draw man\u2019s attention to various vile acts to which he has grown accustomed?\u201d<\/p>\n

The twentieth-century view that saw Stravinsky and Schoenberg towering over the contemporary musical landscape has never seemed more remote. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PostClassical Ensemble\u2019s month-long \u201cInterpreting Shostakovich\u201d festival, in DC, began with a screening of Grigori Kozintsev\u2019s 1970 film version of King Lear, with music by Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak\u2019s Shakespeare translation. If ever there was a film that cannot be viewed at home in TV, this is it. On the wide screen of the National Gallery […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-471","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-7B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}