Shostakovich 4: anyone else got a 'problem piece' by a beloved composer?

[teamsaint]

What I don't get is that someone can 'get' the 15th, which pays so much tribute to the 4th, yet not the 4th itself. I wonder of the composer's own arrangement for 2 pianos (for some decades the only way it was ever heard, and then only in private performaces) would help get entry into its essence?

That must be a fair old ask of the pianists....shall deffo try to get a listen of this. Thanks.

[arthroceph]

This is a pretty big question: it asks about Shost 4 and then about problem pieces in general.

I'll have a go at the latter first and the former second and then I'll stop boring people.

Yes, I have what I call a "nice-but-dull" group of pieces and even composer which are things that actually sound nice but don't seem to have any surface tension, like all liquids really should :-)
- Dvořak's vc conc, tremendously famous ... melodic blandness personified. His vn conc is also boring but at least it isn't famous.
- Schuman's symphonies: especially the Rhenish. No action forthcoming.
- Hindemith ... nothing happens, although the textures are quite good.
- Lady gaga - poker face is about some mafia guy who is great at keeping a straight face. As he's killing you I expect. Emotionless. Don't get it. At least it's catchy. the rest of her stuff is beyond useless.

Sorry can't go into the Shost 4 right now. Even if you don't like the whole, there's some brilliant turns of harmony in it. A further question is whether you like Lady Macbeth?

[The fact I have mentioned Lady Gaga and Lady Macbeth in one single post isn't lost on me :-\ ]

[Suffolkcoastal]

Vaughan Williams: The Poisoned Kiss. The only piece by my favourite composer I can't get on with, it is not helped by the awful libretto even when it was slightly updated for the Chandos recording.
Britten: most works he composed between 1965 and 1970, especially The Prodigal Son (I love the 1st two Parables but this final Parable was just one too many) and the absolutely ghastly 'The Golden Vanity'.
Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius, it has some lovely passages, but the whole thing leaves me cold.
Faure: Requiem, it just bores me rigid.
Tchaikovsky: The Enchantress, good 1st Act, but after that, it's pretty dire and I just find nothing worthwhile in it.
Most of Mahler's symphonies of course.

[Barbirollians]

This is a pretty big question: it asks about Shost 4 and then about problem pieces in general.

I'll have a go at the latter first and the former second and then I'll stop boring people.

Yes, I have what I call a "nice-but-dull" group of pieces and even composer which are things that actually sound nice but don't seem to have any surface tension, like all liquids really should :-)
- Dvořak's vc conc, tremendously famous ... melodic blandness personified. His vn conc is also boring but at least it isn't famous.
- Schuman's symphonies: especially the Rhenish. No action forthcoming.
- Hindemith ... nothing happens, although the textures are quite good.
- Lady gaga - poker face is about some mafia guy who is great at keeping a straight face. As he's killing you I expect. Emotionless. Don't get it. At least it's catchy. the rest of her stuff is beyond useless.

Sorry can't go into the Shost 4 right now. Even if you don't like the whole, there's some brilliant turns of harmony in it. A further question is whether you like Lady Macbeth?



[The fact I have mentioned Lady Gaga and Lady Macbeth in one single post isn't lost on me :-\ ]

Melodic blandness Dvorak's Cello Concerto -I prescribe the Fournier/Szell recording . Schumann no action !!! Kubelik in No1 , Szell in No 2 , and Furtwangler in 4 - the Rhenish I admit is the weakest .

Hindemith - but for Oistrakh's recording of the Violin Concerto I am minded to agree.

[Barbirollians]

Like Caliban, I just don't understand Shostakovich 4 but I play it often as I love every note of it. The first time I heard it live, I had almost permanent goose bumps.

Two I just don't like and have stopped listening to.

Beethoven; 'Choral' Symphony No.9. Beethoven going OTT and failing.
Schubert: 'Great' Symphony No.9. Just too good to be true, No adventure, nothing out of the ordinary.

I wonder how many hands have gone up in horror!!!!!

No way - Barbirolli's Schubert 9 is thrilling !!! as for the Choral I am so sorry for you - how about the vintage Philharmonia and Furtwangler in Lucerne in 1954 - rejuvenates the piece for me

[teamsaint]

Well I got a lot of Flak , sorry advice , about this the other day, but Brahms 2 just doesn't do it for me.
However. I shall be addressing this issue in the long winter months. And he is one of my favourites.

[jayne lee wilson]

Never seen that comment about the DSCH 4 "path not taken". Striking view, for no.4 does have some characteristics which if not unique to it, are certainly more extreme than elsewhere in the canon...
Whilst it's possible to map out a sonata structure in the first movement, (short expo., long development, varied recap) does it not come across as a series of vivid, often visually evocative, episodes? And without any real sense of getting anywhere - more of being trapped in the same crazy nightmare, or waking to the same reality in the coda. I use the phrase too often, but "developing variation" could almost be a formal description of it; but there's not much developmental, symphonic momentum THROUGH the piece is there?

The finale too is, more explicitly, a series of episodes, yet here there IS a sense of progression - after the funeral march the tension deepens through a brutally reductive allegro and a strangely melancholy divertissement where the more balletic ideas only underline the macabre atmosphere - "a season in hell" (which often reminds me of the vision of hell in the TV series Twin Peaks - remember the dancing dwarf, the red curtains, the chequerboard floor, the screams?). So the final explosion, and the vision of smoking ruins after it, arrives as an emotional and imaginative necessity, not a musically logical one.

And in between? A songform scherzo, a simple ABABA... (with a rattle of the bones at its close).

Anyone who finds it difficult to listen to might be trying (consciously or not) to find traditional forms, or a sense of musical progress or "arrival", where only ghosts of these things are to be glimpsed, if at all. It's an evocation of a shattered world - a shattered, terrified, brutally tyrannised society - or the stage beyond society where The Great Terror is a terrorising of shape and meaning, of the individual mind which feels the surveillance of every other mind, each seeking its own, necessarily selfish, protection or advancement.

And that's what makes it a unique and difficult masterpiece. Symphonies 5, 8 and 10 effect a closer rapprochement with classical form and structural balance, 6,7 and 11 create their own unique paths; you might see 15 as a compressed recap of all that he attempted - but 4 does seem to me to stand alone, for even Yeats' "a terrible beauty is born" doesn't even begin to describe it.

[Flay]

That's an excellent explanation, Jayne. Perhaps I have never "got" it because I avoid that feeling of paranoid isolation it engenders; it makes me feel too uncomfortable.

[EdgeleyRob]

Vaughan Williams: The Poisoned Kiss. The only piece by my favourite composer I can't get on with, it is not helped by the awful libretto even when it was slightly updated for the Chandos recording.

Never mind the silly story,just wallow in the music sc.

Beethoven; 'Choral' Symphony No.9. Beethoven going OTT and failing.

We've been here before,the first 3 movements are ok.

I'd better not mention Sibelius,my problem child composer,ooops too late.

[Nick Armstrong]

What I don't get is that someone can 'get' the 15th, which pays so much tribute to the 4th, yet not the 4th itself.

I know! Weird, aren't I ?

Interesting point about the 2 x piano version. Shall investigate

[Nick Armstrong]

This is a pretty big question

Why thank you !

Lady Gaga - Lady Macbeth: this is a pretty big leap in two lines !

And not a big fan of Lady Macbeth, but that's no guide - not a big opera person (esp Russian operas)

[teamsaint]

I'll tell you something for nothing , this ***** symphony has got right under my skin now.

Everything else on hold, listening and re listening, reading and re reading stuff about it, haven't eaten all day,trying different states of dimmed lighting.....

[HighlandDougie]

Never seen that comment about the DSCH 4 "path not taken". Striking view, for no.4 does have some characteristics which if not unique to it, are certainly more extreme than elsewhere in the canon...
Whilst it's possible to map out a sonata structure in the first movement, (short expo., long development, varied recap) does it not come across as a series of vivid, often visually evocative, episodes? And without any real sense of getting anywhere - more of being trapped in the same crazy nightmare, or waking to the same reality in the coda. I use the phrase too often, but "developing variation" could almost be a formal description of it; but there's not much developmental, symphonic momentum THROUGH the piece is there?

The finale too is, more explicitly, a series of episodes, yet here there IS a sense of progression - after the funeral march the tension deepens through a brutally reductive allegro and a strangely melancholy divertissement where the more balletic ideas only underline the macabre atmosphere - "a season in hell" (which often reminds me of the vision of hell in the TV series Twin Peaks - remember the dancing dwarf, the red curtains, the chequerboard floor, the screams?). So the final explosion, and the vision of smoking ruins after it, arrives as an emotional and imaginative necessity, not a musically logical one.

And in between? A songform scherzo, a simple ABABA... (with a rattle of the bones at its close).

Anyone who finds it difficult to listen to might be trying (consciously or not) to find traditional forms, or a sense of musical progress or "arrival", where only ghosts of these things are to be glimpsed, if at all. It's an evocation of a shattered world - a shattered, terrified, brutally tyrannised society - or the stage beyond society where The Great Terror is a terrorising of shape and meaning, of the individual mind which feels the surveillance of every other mind, each seeking its own, necessarily selfish, protection or advancement.

And that's what makes it a unique and difficult masterpiece. Symphonies 5, 8 and 10 effect a closer rapprochement with classical form and structural balance, 6,7 and 11 create their own unique paths; you might see 15 as a compressed recap of all that he attempted - but 4 does seem to me to stand alone, for even Yeats' "a terrible beauty is born" doesn't even begin to describe it.

While my training as a historian makes me wary of reading too much a posteriori meaning into music, JLW's, well, exegesis of what I think is one of the great masterpieces of 20th Century music gets it spot-on. Clear an hour, sit down, turn up the volume as loud as the neighbours can bear, put on of the many fine recordings (Kondrashin, Previn, Rattle, Caetani, Wigglesworth et al), bear in mind where and when it was written and just let it all unfold.

[Nick Armstrong]

I'll tell you something for nothing , this ***** symphony has got right under my skin now.

Everything else on hold, reading and re reading stuff about it, haven't eaten all day,trying different states of dimmed lighting.....

Are you serious?

I'm getting the Barshai / WDRSO version out of my "2 quid from Superdrug bargain of all time" Brilliant Classics box-set this weekend... I'll tell you THAT for nothing!

[ahinton]

Never seen that comment about the DSCH 4 "path not taken". Striking view, for no.4 does have some characteristics which if not unique to it, are certainly more extreme than elsewhere in the canon...
Whilst it's possible to map out a sonata structure in the first movement, (short expo., long development, varied recap) does it not come across as a series of vivid, often visually evocative, episodes? And without any real sense of getting anywhere - more of being trapped in the same crazy nightmare, or waking to the same reality in the coda. I use the phrase too often, but "developing variation" could almost be a formal description of it; but there's not much developmental, symphonic momentum THROUGH the piece is there?

The finale too is, more explicitly, a series of episodes, yet here there IS a sense of progression - after the funeral march the tension deepens through a brutally reductive allegro and a strangely melancholy divertissement where the more balletic ideas only underline the macabre atmosphere - "a season in hell" (which often reminds me of the vision of hell in the TV series Twin Peaks - remember the dancing dwarf, the red curtains, the chequerboard floor, the screams?). So the final explosion, and the vision of smoking ruins after it, arrives as an emotional and imaginative necessity, not a musically logical one.

And in between? A songform scherzo, a simple ABABA... (with a rattle of the bones at its close).

Anyone who finds it difficult to listen to might be trying (consciously or not) to find traditional forms, or a sense of musical progress or "arrival", where only ghosts of these things are to be glimpsed, if at all. It's an evocation of a shattered world - a shattered, terrified, brutally tyrannised society - or the stage beyond society where The Great Terror is a terrorising of shape and meaning, of the individual mind which feels the surveillance of every other mind, each seeking its own, necessarily selfish, protection or advancement.

And that's what makes it a unique and difficult masterpiece. Symphonies 5, 8 and 10 effect a closer rapprochement with classical form and structural balance, 6,7 and 11 create their own unique paths; you might see 15 as a compressed recap of all that he attempted - but 4 does seem to me to stand alone, for even Yeats' "a terrible beauty is born" doesn't even begin to describe it.

You really do seem almost to have the monopoly on the greatest good sense here! What sensitive commentaries! I accept the "crazy nightmare" aspects of 4's first movement, yet those "visually evocative episodes" do, for me at least, coalesce at the same time into something of a purposeful and convincingly direction-conscious and logical narrative, even if to some extent forging a logic out of apparent illogicality. As to the coda of the finale, I've never heard such profound tragedy expressed in bursts of C major anywhere in the repertoire; as I've suggested elsewhere, compare Praise to the Holiest towards the close of Gerontius and Die Sonne towards that of Gurrelieder - massive big heavy brass-laden triumphal affirmations each with a root position common chord of C major at the top, just as has the opening of the coda in Shostakovich 4's finale - yet Shostakovich somehow contrives to inform his with the most doom-laden inevitability and a sense of despairing hopelessness that can only collapse into a C minor heap as it burns itself out. He wasn't even 30 when he wrote this! Whatever kind of emotional capacity did he have?...

4 stands alone indeed...

Thank you very much for your unique and uniquely persuasive arguments here...