On Thursday, my neighbor and I went to our first CSO concert of the season. Klaus Makela, still a Director-designee, opened it with Sibelius’s 7th and Shostakovich’s 4th. Hearing Shostakovich’s 4th for the first time in my life and being completely unprepared for what I was about to listen to was so shocking that, several days later, I am still processing what I heard.
I didn’t know the story about this symphony, how it was created, and how the premiere was withdrawn (surprisingly so, because I heard so many details about Shostakovich’s reaction to the infamous Pravda editorial), and now I am trying to place in time his phone conversation with Stalin relative to writing and rehearsing of the 4th Symphony.
According to my grandmother, Stalin told him: “You should compose marches, young man, do you hear me? Marches! Our people want to march, and they have to music to march to!” (For the sake of my Russian -speaking friends, the exact wording was: “Марши надо писать, молодой человек, марши! Народ хочет маршировать, а не подо что!”
You can read the story of the 4th Symphony withdrawal, the hiding of the manuscript, and the first performance in Moscow in 1961. What I am wondering is how in the world Shostakovich could think that it would be possible to perform it?! After the above-mentioned article in Pravda. How?! I talked to Boris about it, and he said: and how could the rest of his music be performed? But I still think that the 4th Symphony is something incomparable with any other of Shostakovich’s works. So bold. So powerful. So full of grotesque and bitter irony.
I am now listening to the recording, trying to capture all of the details of Part III, because I definitely missed a lot during the concert, completely taken away by evolving havoc :).
