Proms Extra: Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

My point is only that this may not be such a well known fact as some suppose.

But the fact that it well-enough-known for "some" to make such a supposition suggests that it is well-enough known for it to be at least" important" (/"interesting") enough for the Shostakovich authorities involved in the programme (only TS is a "professional R3 presenter" - the others are academics) to mention, even if only to dismiss?




(And to ahinton re DSCH #12: not "the worst" IMO - better tunes than the 7th, and taking up less of my time!)

[Beef Oven!]

Absolutely correct! And to tower above the others, given the many virtues among them, is an astonishing achievement even for Shostakovich! The composer is said to have exclaimed to Isaak Glikman immediately after its much-delayed première that he considered it to be his finest work - and by that time he had a dozen symphonies (and much else besides) to his credit. And who's for no. 12 as his worst? - though why it should have to have been so when one thinks of what he'd been writing in the years immediately preceding it - as well as what he was to go on to do - I have no idea.

IMV, DCSH has 3/4 worst symphonies.

[zola]

But the fact that it well-enough-known for "some" to make such a supposition suggests that it is well-enough known for it to be at least" important" (/"interesting") enough for the Shostakovich authorities involved in the programme (only TS is a "professional R3 presenter" - the others are academics) to mention, even if only to dismiss?

Did anyone actually attend the pre-Pom talk ? The broadcast versions are heavily cut, sometimes by as much as 50%.

[jayne lee wilson]

Absolutely correct! And to tower above the others, given the many virtues among them, is an astonishing achievement even for Shostakovich! The composer is said to have exclaimed to Isaak Glikman immediately after its much-delayed première that he considered it to be his finest work - and by that time he had a dozen symphonies (and much else besides) to his credit. And who's for no. 12 as his worst? - though why it should have to have been so when one thinks of what he'd been writing in the years immediately preceding it - as well as what he was to go on to do - I have no idea.

Sorry to be still OT, Bryn, but - yes AH; for me, the 12th is so obviously the worst I wish I'd never heard it & always avoid it now. It sounds bored, tired & uninspired, exactly the sort of production you'd expect from a composer responding reluctantly to an official commission. One of the shorter symphonies, it always feels interminable.
Beyond placing 12, 3 and 2 at the bottom, I'd find it hard to make any league-table of quality here, but I'm surprised the 9th is so infrequently mentioned - it's always been one I love to revisit, as is the 6th. Both have a degree more mystery about them, a juxtaposition of images rather than a "linear" narrative with any resolution. The 15th can seem the culmination of that "group of 3": images set side-by-side, adumbrating the neo-classical yet expressing raw pain & violence; concise, yet almost surrealist in their dreamlike, alien or cartoonish evocations.

But Shostakovich wrote several different types of symphony, with several modes or registers of expression - I think that's why they're often misunderstood. I've tried to categorise these before, loosely as:

Autobiographies: 1, 4-6, 10.
War Symphonies 7-9.
Songs and Dances of Death: 13-15.
AGITPROP: 2,3, 11,12.

....or you could start again and have 1, 6, 9 and 15 as "neo-classical", 7 and 8 as "Epic", "Dramatic" or "Cinematographic", etc...
(and I guess 11 doesn't deserve its uninspired companions...)

[johnb]

Sorry to be still OT, Bryn, but - yes AH; for me, the 12th is so obviously the worst I wish I'd never heard it & always avoid it now. It sounds bored, tired & uninspired, exactly the sort of production you'd expect from a composer responding reluctantly to an official commission.

There is a dubious story about the 12th that is quoted in Elizabeth Wilson's book. It goes that Shostakovich had written a different symphony but shortly before the premier realised that it would be totally unacceptable and, in a panic, wrote what is now known as the 12th over a weekend. Even for a composer who put the music down on paper as quickly as Shostakovich this stretches the imagination.

An interesting thought about the 12th that was voiced by John Pickard during a course I attended. The 12th and 13th have consecutive Opus numbers, though I believe that Shostakovich worked on the orchestration of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death between the two symphonies. Perhaps the consecutive numbers were deliberate and Shostakovich was using the 12th as his "get out of jail card" for the dark and blistering 13th, which Mravinsky refused to premier even though he premiered all the symphonies (apart from the 7th) from the 5th up until that point.

[richardfinegold]

There is a dubious story about the 12th that is quoted in Elizabeth Wilson's book. It goes that Shostakovich had written a different symphony but shortly before the premier realised that it would be totally unacceptable and, in a panic, wrote what is now known as the 12th over a weekend. Even for a composer who put the music down on paper as quickly as Shostakovich this stretches the imagination.

An interesting thought about the 12th that was voiced by John Pickard during a course I attended. The 12th and 13th have consecutive Opus numbers, though I believe that Shostakovich worked on the orchestration of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death between the two symphonies. Perhaps the consecutive numbers were deliberate and Shostakovich was using the 12th as his "get out of jail card" for the dark and blistering 13th, which Mravinsky refused to premier even though he premiered all the symphonies (apart from the 7th) from the 5th up until that point.

Interesting supposition

[ahinton]

Sorry to be still OT, Bryn, but - yes AH; for me, the 12th is so obviously the worst I wish I'd never heard it & always avoid it now. It sounds bored, tired & uninspired, exactly the sort of production you'd expect from a composer responding reluctantly to an official commission. One of the shorter symphonies, it always feels interminable.
Beyond placing 12, 3 and 2 at the bottom, I'd find it hard to make any league-table of quality here, but I'm surprised the 9th is so infrequently mentioned - it's always been one I love to revisit, as is the 6th. Both have a degree more mystery about them, a juxtaposition of images rather than a "linear" narrative with any resolution. The 15th can seem the culmination of that "group of 3": images set side-by-side, adumbrating the neo-classical yet expressing raw pain & violence; concise, yet almost surrealist in their dreamlike, alien or cartoonish evocations.

But Shostakovich wrote several different types of symphony, with several modes or registers of expression - I think that's why they're often misunderstood. I've tried to categorise these before, loosely as:

Autobiographies: 1, 4-6, 10.
War Symphonies 7-9.
Songs and Dances of Death: 13-15.
AGITPROP: 2,3, 11,12.

....or you could start again and have 1, 6, 9 and 15 as "neo-classical", 7 and 8 as "Epic", "Dramatic" or "Cinematographic", etc...
(and I guess 11 doesn't deserve its uninspired companions...)

What fascinating thoughts!

I once said to someone that Shostakovich wrote only eleven symphonies - nos. 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13 & 15. OK, at least 2 has the virtue of being genuinely experimental which it seems to me that its successor does not, 14 doesn't count because, although it fits neatly into your apt "Songs and Dances of Death" category, I've never been able to come to terms with it and absorb it as a symphony per se and the less said about 12 the better, given that it strikes me just as it does you. Yes, 9 does tend at times to get unreasonably sidelined (as does the finer 6); I wonder whose idea it was to place it in a Prom programme a few years ago with a work by Rachmaninov and two by Xenakis (and I wonder what Shostakovich would have made of that?!).

Whilst I might be rather more loath than you to set up categories for the symphonies of Shostakovich, I cannot imagine it being done better!

How strange it must have felt on a number of levels to have had to have his finest symphony kept under wraps for a quarter of a century - more than one-third of his life, indeed!...

[ahinton]

There is a dubious story about the 12th that is quoted in Elizabeth Wilson's book. It goes that Shostakovich had written a different symphony but shortly before the premier realised that it would be totally unacceptable and, in a panic, wrote what is now known as the 12th over a weekend. Even for a composer who put the music down on paper as quickly as Shostakovich this stretches the imagination.

I've read and hearad about that one, too and, yes, if does stretch credibility even for him; the eighth in three weeks is already beyond mind-boggling (especially as, unlike 12, it's one of his top-drawer symphonies!) but 12 over a weekend? Can't buy that one, I'm afraid. The speed at which Shostakovich wrote was often helpd by the fact that even works like 8 went striaght down into full score final draft, but even that factor could not possibly account for 12 over a single weekend, for all its faults!

An interesting thought about the 12th that was voiced by John Pickard during a course I attended. The 12th and 13th have consecutive Opus numbers, though I believe that Shostakovich worked on the orchestration of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death between the two symphonies. Perhaps the consecutive numbers were deliberate and Shostakovich was using the 12th as his "get out of jail card" for the dark and blistering 13th, which Mravinsky refused to premier even though he premiered all the symphonies (apart from the 7th) from the 5th up until that point.

John Pickard can invariably be relied upon to come up with thought-provoking ideas of this kind. I have no evidence to back this up but it sounds eminently plausible to me (a good deal more so that the idea of his having written 12 over a weekend during at least some of which he'd have been more profitably occupied watching football!). Mravinsky refused to première 13 on account of the content on which it is based and probably did so for reasons of his own safety whereas Shostakovich himself, despite being no stranger to authoritarian censure at that time, maintained the courage of his convictions and went ahead and wrote 13 as he did (and a most remarkable work it is - not for nothing did Sorabji, who came very late to Shostakovich, descriube its opening movement as "Mother Russia")...

[BBMmk2]

Ahinton, strange as it may seem, I have never felt that some of DS's canon is quite a proper symphony, eg no.5.

I have never for lt that No.14 was a symphony, either. Thankfully, someone else thinks that way.

No.12, I just cannot classify it as a symphony. As mentioned above, a rather panicky written score, written in haste to be approved by the powers that be.

[mahlerei]

For a thoughtful re-evaluation of this much-maligned symphony may I point boarders towards the new Pentatone recording with Paavo Järvi and the Russian National Orchestra? A real ear-opener, IMO.

[Stanfordian]

For a thoughtful re-evaluation of this much-maligned symphony may I point boarders towards the new Pentatone recording with Paavo Järvi and the Russian National Orchestra? A real ear-opener, IMO.

Hiya mahlerei,

Which symphony is that?

[richardfinegold]

For a thoughtful re-evaluation of this much-maligned symphony may I point boarders towards the new Pentatone recording with Paavo Järvi and the Russian National Orchestra? A real ear-opener, IMO.

What distinguishes it?
I just listened to Bernstein NY/ Phil on Sunday. I hadn't heard that version for a while, as I usually listen to his Chicago DG remake. I don't think that Bernsteins interpretation became significantly different through the years. A little broadening of the pacing of the movements perhaps but no significant changes to correspond to the way that his interpretation of the 5th would change over the same time span

[Sir Velo]

Hiya mahlerei,

Which symphony is that?

The seventh, presumably?

[ahinton]

Ahinton, strange as it may seem, I have never felt that some of DS's canon is quite a proper symphony, eg no.5.

Really? On what particular grounds? 14 took me so long to get accustomed to because it's really a song cycle rather than a symphony per se, but I do believe that it's the only one of the 15 that sticks out as a "non-symphony" - and, after all, Schönberg once said (and wrote) of him and Sibelius that they have "the breath of symphonists"...

I have never for lt that No.14 was a symphony, either. Thankfully, someone else thinks that way.

I wonder what Britten, for whom it was composed and who conducted its première, thought about that? I have a letter from him expressing great enthusiasm for the work but he made no comment on that aspect of it.

No.12, I just cannot classify it as a symphony. As mentioned above, a rather panicky written score, written in haste to be approved by the powers that be.

Oh, it's a symphony all right; just a dispiritingly pale imitation of one by Shostakovich (IMHO).

[mahlerei]

Yes, the Seventh. Less febrile/filmic than most, Bernstein especially, and more interesting as music. He reminds us what a fine piece this is, and shows how differently it can be done without losing any of its impact.

The playing of the RNO is excellent, as is the recording. PJ hadn't impressed me much in this repertoire - his Cincinnati 10th springs to mind - but this and his new recording of DSCH cantatas has changed that.