Prom 44: Wednesday 17th August at 7.30 p.m. (Russian Music)

[Quarky]

A postscript to to a terrific performance of DSCH VC1 -nearly as good as Julia Fischer's last year.

Encores are a total waste of time at best, and at worst a diversion from the memory of the main work.

They seem to be "expected" for certain works or for certain famous performers or if the audience starts stamping its feet. But if their occurrence were reduced by a factor of ten or so, then they might become more meaningful.

[Nick Armstrong]

Who was the culprit that coughed right at the end of Petrushka?

I'd forgotten about that!!! Right (to the millisecond) on the very final hushed note

[Nick Armstrong]

Am I being stupid or does this concert not seem to be included in the afternoon repeats on Radio 3?

Having been there and enjoyed the concerto and especially Petrushka so much, I wanted to hear how it comes across on FM. (I know it will be on the iPlayer, but I'd rather hear it in top sound).

Can anyone assist?

[BBMmk2]

Coughers should have a lifetime ban, or a season ban when they do it like that!

They always play the DSCH VC1, what's wrong with VC2?

[Anna]

Am I being stupid or does this concert not seem to be included in the afternoon repeats on Radio 3?

Having been there and enjoyed the concerto and especially Petrushka so much, I wanted to hear how it comes across on FM. (I know it will be on the iPlayer, but I'd rather hear it in top sound).

Can anyone assist?

At your service! You've missed it! Repeated on Radio 3 2.20pm 19 August 2011 (which was yesterday) I thought it was a cracking Prom, one that really stood out for me

[Nick Armstrong]

At your service! You've missed it! Repeated on Radio 3 2.20pm 19 August 2011 (which was yesterday) I thought it was a cracking Prom, one that really stood out for me

Oh b-b-b-b-b-s

Oh well, thank you Anna... They've caught up with themselves somehow - the previous Wednesday evening Prom was on the following Monday afternoon, not a mere 43 hours later

Glad you heard it though!

Talking of lifetime bans, I arrived with only moments to spare... as the slow quiet second movement of the introductory Age of Gold suite began, I suddenly remembered that not only was my mobile phone not switched off, it was not even muted (in case of calls while cycling from office to concert)... I couldn't move then and started literally to perspire with fear that someone would ring. Or my Auntie would text as she tends to do to remind me about Who Do You Think You Are?

I was able to silence it before the concerto ...

Damn it, I really wanted to listen to and record the Petrushka

[3rd Viennese School]

Quote. "They always play the DSCH VC1, what's wrong with VC2?"



Because the finale of VC2 is cxxxx.

This is coming from a Shoshtakovich fan as well!

3VS

[Bryn]

Don't give a second thought to any negative comments re. the finale of VC2. I reckon the you just keep missing performance because they are put on a year early.

[Panjandrum]

I'd forgotten about that!!! Right (to the millisecond) on the very final hushed note

It's so that they can say to their friends: "Did you hear that ignorant tw@t at the end? That was me!"

[3rd Viennese School]

Wonder why they don’t play Shoshtakovich Cello Concerto no.2 more often at the Proms? That’s his best concerto!

3VS

[Nick Armstrong]

Wonder why they don’t play Shoshtakovich Cello Concerto no.2 more often at the Proms? That’s his best concerto!

3VS

I think it's my favourite too, along with the piano concertos. Love the spelling 3VS - Shloshtakovich... Not far off the mark, too, understandably, if Kurt Sanderling's stories are to be believed...

[bluestateprommer]

I'll admit that I wasn't planning to listen to this Prom on iPlayer, because the program was too standard for my taste. But after reading the reviews and comments here, decided to give it a whirl. It was a very good Prom, even if I wasn't quite as gobsmacked overall as most people here. Obviously iPlayer just isn't the same as being there. I will say, however, that LB was a wonder in DSCH 1 (an obvious tie in with her new DG recording with E-PS). The Philharmonia were definitely in very fine form, which certainly speaks well of the partnership between the orchestra and Salonen.

Wonder why they don’t play Shoshtakovich Cello Concerto no.2 more often at the Proms? That’s his best concerto!

Well, for 3VS, the answer is fairly easy: DSCH's Cello Concerto No. 2 is a subtler, less show-off-y piece compared to the First Cello Concerto. I've never heard it live, and am not sure I ever will. Likewise, for his Violin Concerto No. 2, it's not as obviously a blockbuster work as the Violin Concerto No. 1. I have heard VC #2 live, however, once with Baiba Skride and the New Jersey Symphony with Neeme Jarvi. In the last movement, the violinist broke a string, which made the audience gasp. She calmly went over to the concertmaster, switched instruments with him, and finished the concerto, picking up just where she left off.

(Political rant button on now)

BTW, for those citing Testimony in talking about DSCH, not a good idea and I don't advise it, because Laurel Fay conclusively showed that the manuscript and DSCH's supposed "dissident" dictations were not authenticated, after she had a good look at the manuscript, as written about by Paul Mitchinson in The Nation back in 2004 (emphasis mine):

"In the pages of The Nation, literary critic Simon Karlinsky noted that two lengthy passages appeared to be lifted verbatim from previously published Soviet sources. Laurel Fay, an independent scholar, quickly discovered five more such passages.

The discovery had an ominous significance. Shostakovich had apparently 'authenticated' Volkov’s manuscript by affixing his signature, along with the Russian word 'chital' ['read'], to the first page of each of the manuscript's eight chapters. By coincidence, the recycled passages discovered by Fay and Karlinsky, which were entirely innocuous in content, all appeared on these signed pages. Shostakovich, in other words, had apparently authenticated nothing that hadn't already appeared in the Soviet Union.

In 2000, Fay finally managed to confirm her suspicions by examining a photocopy of the manuscript acquired by the Shostakovich Family Archive in Moscow. As she reveals in A Shostakovich Casebook.....not a single page 'authenticated' by Shostakovich contains anything but previously published material. (Full disclosure: An essay [Mitchinson] wrote for Lingua Franca is republished in A Shostakovich Casebook.) The manuscript's signed pages generally reproduce the exact word order, punctuation (including parentheses, commas, dashes and quotation marks) and paragraph breaks of the earlier published material. Sentences that date the original passages have been deleted by hand. Two inflammatory passages, which Volkov's supporters recently cited as evidence of Shostakovich's dissidence, did not originally appear on these signed pages, but were added later. In most cases, this word-for-word copying stops precisely at the end of the signed manuscript page - the very next word of the following (unsigned) page often veers off into uncharted anti-Stalinist territory."

I realize that it's very politically correct to trump up DSCH as a perennial closet dissident during the Stalin era. I certainly don't shed a tear for the fact that the USSR is gone (nor does Fay, contrary to her bashers, which include no less than that fact-slippery loose cannon Norman Lebrecht). The fact that the USSR was a monstrous regime doesn't give one license to make up anything one wants about the USSR. That "end justifies the means" mindset is the same that, here in the USA, allows Andrew Breitbart and his wingnut thugs to slander the group ACORN out of existence and hound Shirley Sherrod out of the US government, but I digress.

(Political rant button off now)

Getting back to the neglected "Concerti No. 2", from a look at the Proms archive:

Last performance (and only performance) of DSCH's CC # 2: September 3, 1988 (Lynn Harrell / Concertgebouw / Chailly)
Last performance (and only performance) of DSCH's VC # 2: August 22, 1968 (David Oistrakh / USSR State Orch / Svetlanov) (*)

It's definitely high time for each of these DSCH concerti to be brought back to The Proms. Fingers crossed.

(*) FYI, this was right around the beginning of the crushing of the Prague Spring, and the day after Rostropovich's famous performance of the Dvorak Cello Concerto at The Proms.

[Nick Armstrong]

Damn it, I really wanted to listen to and record the Petrushka

I have just been given a CD of the Petrushka and Shostakovich Concerto, recorded on very swanky equipment from a very good FM signal, by a friend and sometime contributor to these boards.

It shows that the broadcast and above all the performances were absolutely top class - utterly gripping, with the percussion in the Stravinsky (inc the piano) and the soloist in the Shostakovich having electrifying presence. The concerto sounds much better than it came across to us from our position in the odd acoustics of the hall. I'm thrilled.

If anyone's desperate to hear it, something could perhaps be arranged (I have it in MP3 form on my computer now).

And....

Who was the culprit that coughed right at the end of Petrushka?

yes, you can still hear the 'ignorant tw@t' (if I may quote Panjandrum) right on cue on the last note