Saturday Evening Movie-- Close Up Shostakovich: A Portrait Of The Russian Composer
[Click through to YouTube.]
I watched it and read many of the comments, from people very familiar with Shostakovich. Some complain that the biographer quoted has been discredited, but it still stands as a good account of the basic story, and many family members appear in the film.
One thing I noticed that has nothing to do with Shostakovich—the men during the Stalin era in the former Soviet Union greeted one another with cheek kisses?
I never noticed that before. It felt like Mandala effect, a little. But more likely, I just never noticed it.
I’ve always wanted somebody with a true ear for classical music to tell me what they hear in his 5th symphony—the one that Russian people heard as their story finally told, while the Stalin crowd took as their ideological conquering of Shostakovich.
The 5th Symphony of Shostakovich has its own, lengthy Wikipedia page. (Are we in a simulation?) 🫣
“The astonishing thing about his 5th Symphony is that it could so easily have been trite, obedient, hollowed out music (like those painfully forgettable film scores he did in the late 1940s). Instead he produces an extraordinarily rich and meaningful masterpiece, written through with fear and hope and survival - and sheer love of life.”
—YouTube comment.
”Your business is rejoicing. Your business is rejoicing.”
Poor guy.
Sat in the front row and fell asleep at the Fifth. I love it and it’s so bombastic. But I slept lol.
Having ,long ago , studied post grad with the russians - (5 years Phillipe Hirshorn -the ultimate satirist ''They think I'm the angel of death ,which I probably am'' referring to why Lieberman's major intl competition winning students were scared (& obliged) to come to him, at all .
PH was a big man ,daring to demonstrate mozart 5th concerto ( which Lieberman had bitched on regularly to students ,being far harder than paganini or anything else)- for my sometimes 2x weekly lesson ,roasting - upon entering the chamber -greeted by PH's live demonstration of Mozart 5 ; seeing my eyebrows raised , subsequent appreciation ''that's not bad''- finishing together the (liturgical)- ''for a russian'' together ,laughing) .PH did that , to mimic his own criticisms .. It was an active dismantling of technocracy by a Soviet politicisation of art as satire -
( https://youtu.be/LUKxJlsKkkc shows what it was like standing in close vicinity of such acoustic nuclear fusion . )
I also played shostakovich 5th symphony ,which is doublespeak in its finest form .Solzhenitsen's We Never Make Mistakes - is related ,at least in spirit .
I found his string quartets less opaque ,as that is a less censurable 'diary 'form . (Mozarts greatest works regularly quoted from Bach's seminal equivalents- a Mozart fugue is a massive thing ,like 10 camels racing each other ,abreast)-all gleaned from the highest form of shorthand - the place of fugue in a string quartet - which JS Bach touched on in the 48 ,but in germinal form .
So these bold Shostakovitch 'nursery rhymes'- the kind of satire that Shostakovich hid all over the place ,like Alban Berg in his violin concerto - from which his mentor Schoenberg saw fit to begin serial music (12 tone rows variations )from the idea- in almost all his (Shostakovitch's) Stalin laboured symphonies .
Shostakovich wanted one thing in his life - to make people laugh .
He failed .
But so did Shakespeare ,in comparison to the Goons (Peter Sellers ,Spike Milligan ,Harry Secombe )
But they failed ,in comparison to NL's Johnny Van Doorn - who was of the opinion nobody had the right to understand him - he combined the breadth of Shostakovich's doublespeak with a kind of Monty Pythonism -that needs injected into Fauci ASAP .
The Soviet referential '' double cheek whammy '' greeting is a cultural equivalent of 'so you're not dead yet'?' - not that anyone western would get that .
A good hard slap on the back was reserved for special occasions .
But the transition between Sovietism and laughter is best demonstrated by Ingrid Bergman in the early parts of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cwbs3TKS7k
Her humility blew me away - there is no faking the soviet placement of those fingers .
The bit where her teacher says '' it's too important '- my neighbors will complain' ' ,is built on the previous section of her duet based on her astonishing performance of Grieg's piano concerto in A minor .
Better than words .
But Ingrid Bergman has some of the most convincing piano playing ,in her ability to negate Sovietism , in essence .