The Houston Symphony opens Spring for Music.
by Paul Pelkonen
by Paul Pelkonen
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| 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.
