Concert Review: Massacre at Lincoln Center

The New York Philharmonic plays Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The Bloody Sunday Massacre by Ivan Vladimirov.

The month of October in New York has been a bit of a mini-celebration of the works of Dmitri Shostakovich. No fewer than five of the composer's 15 symphonies are appearing on concert programs this month, and his early opera The Nose continues to run at the Metropolitan Opera. This week, the New York Philharmonic contributed to this accidental festival, performing the composer's Eleventh Symphony under the baton of Semyon Bychkov.

Concert Review: Two Sides of Shostakovich

The Houston Symphony opens Spring for Music.
by Paul Pelkonen

Propaganda poster commemorating the massacre of 1905.

On Monday night, Hans Graf and the Houston Symphony kicked off the 2012 Spring for Music Festival at Carnegie Hall with a pair of pieces by Dmitri Shostakovich. The concert offered contrast between Shostakovich as a satirist who locked scores away in his composing desk and the composer in his "official" capacity, celebrating the unsuccessful revolution of 1905 with his Eleventh Symphony.

The first half of the concert featured the U.S. premiere of Anti-Formalist Rayok, Shostakovich's skewering of the Stalinist practice of bringing in bloated so-called "musicologists" to crack down on hard-working composers. It was Stalin's overreaction to Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk that triggered the artistic purges of the 1930s, forcing Shostakovich to lock his Fourth Symphony in a drawer of his composition table.