This Monday marks the beginning of our first set of rehearsals after our spring break. From now until the end of May, it’s pretty much a non-stop run to the final frenzied chords of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The ‘big’ piece, both literally and figuratively, on this week’s program is the Fifth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich.
Did you know that Shostakovich has his own equivalent of ‘birthers’? Yes, he does! The birthers believe that Shostakovich – rather than being a closet anti-Communist, anti-Party activist, whose music is sown with clues to his political agenda – was actually a realist who went along with the Party line to further his own career and spare his own life.
The believers say that the opposite is true – they follow the historical frame set forth in Solomon Volkov’s Shostakovich memoir Testimony. That version of history says that Shostakovich was vehemently anti-Party, and he actively tried to subvert the Communist leadership through hidden meanings in much of his music. I would guess that the trust lies somewhere in the middle between these two extremes.
Much of the controversy around Testimony can be found in this wikipedia article.
More on Shostakovich and his Fifth Symphony in a few days…