Shostakovich Score
Germaine Greenweig
It seems I have run across a very interesting page on my smart phone. Conductors and talented players talking about the importance of pacing a great piece of music. To thyself be true. I love and admire classical orchestras. You bring to us who listen a great joy to our lives. I bought a ticket to hear my first shostakovich in person. One of my favorites the #5. The conductor gustavo dudamel and the los angeles symphony. Located in los angeles at the fantastic looking walt disney concert hall. I love the upper mid balcony for its great sound and detail. I know it will sound just great. MY first visit there. from what I have heard about dudamel l know he can.handle this great piece of work with all the right pace and strength of emotion needed for such a beautiful symphony. at home I love my CD #5 version by the Cleveland orchestra on telarc maazel conducting. love reading your page. music listener.
There are at least 3 places my son has found where there are discrepancies between the older version and the new version, but at least one of them seems to be a typo, so I am not entirely confident that the new version is more correct than the old version.My usual methods of resolving things like this (studying the manuscript or full score, listening to recordings) haven't been helpful, as there isn't easy access to the scores, and the recordings vary on these notes (and occasionally some others!). His teacher said try to research it, and if you can't, go with what Oistrakh played. Any ideas on how we can figure out which notes are intended? For reference, the spots are:m. 175 (2 before marking 36): F# or F natural
m. 226 (at marking 40): G natural versus G flat in both voices
m. 416 (4 before marking 55): top line reads Bb-Bb-D and should be Bb-C-D (likely typo) Tweet !function(d,s,id)var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id))js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1445120298060-0'); ); Replies (9)
Lydia LeongFebruary 25, 2020, 9:31 PM I have the Sikorski violin-with-piano-reduction edition. I think I might also own the International edition back from the 1980s because the Russian copyright stuff occurred, but I have no idea where my copy is.There is a Boosey & Hawkes study score, which you might want to check.
Steve HancockFebruary 26, 2020, 12:09 PM According to the Boosey and Hawkes study score:M. 175 is f natural
M. 226 is g natural both voices
M 416 is Bb-C-DWhen my son performed the piece, he used the score to help settle the questions.A few years back we started buying a study score for each concerto being learned. We have quite a collection now and it always helps create a deeper understanding of the piece. All the best with this amazing piece.
Susan AgrawalFebruary 26, 2020, 3:49 PM Thank you! We usually do purchase study scores -- I just had the misconception that there wasn't one for this piece due to copyright.
Scott ColeFebruary 26, 2020, 3:49 PM "A few years back we started buying a study score for each concerto being learned."It's amazing how seldom students reference the score or piano reduction. In addition to note questions, it can tell you how free or strict you can be in a given passage.
Susan AgrawalFebruary 26, 2020, 7:31 PM I'm surprised to hear that, Scott. My son studies them religiously. When he has performed solo with orchestra he always learns every single orchestral part by memory so he know how everything fits. I thought that was pretty standard for advanced students. How can they even begin to perform if they don't understand how it all fits together?
Stephen SymchychFebruary 27, 2020, 9:35 AM Only the students who follow advice of the best teachers. Which is not everyone.
Paul DeckFebruary 27, 2020, 10:48 AM A person who can memorize every part in the score from beginning to end is called a savant. They do exist.
Lydia LeongFebruary 27, 2020, 3:32 PM I would say that many players can mentally hear a recording in their head, filling in the missing part or telling them what they should anticipate in an orchestral texture. This doesn't mean knowing what everyone is doing exactly as single-line memorization so much as having an awareness of what's going on "vertically" (across the instruments) at any one given time.
Susan AgrawalFebruary 27, 2020, 4:06 PM Yes, what he does is more like what Lydia describes. He doesn't memorize each part separately but the whole texture. But he is also able to tell you things like every single missed entrance and who missed it, and he can typically play anybody's part (on the violin) from memory in a given section if it is the melody or harmony. He's also a fun party trick -- you can play crazy 6 note chords on the piano with all sorts of added notes and he can tell you all the notes and a likely interpretation of them. I've suggested to him that he should consider doing conducting. His theory teacher is a conductor so maybe in a few years he will try some lessons.Now the thing that totally does him in is transposing instruments! googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1445120547957-0'); ); This discussion has been archived and is no longer accepting responses.
Shostakovich was only 26 when he completed Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934). The opera featured a racy plot set to avant-garde music and premiered to critical and popular acclaim. Two years later, three different productions were running in Moscow.
Then Stalin himself went to a performance. The next morning the state newspaper Pravda condemned the work, saying it corrupted the Soviet spirit. The opera disappeared overnight and every publication and political organization in the country heaped personal attacks on its composer.
Unsure about its reception, Shostakovich rejected his own Fourth Symphony while in rehearsal. Instead he premiered Symphony No. 5, obsequiously subtitled "A Soviet Artist's Response to Just Criticism." As required, the work displayed lyricism, a heroic tone and inspiration from Russian literature. Still, many hear a subtext of critical despair beneath the crowd-pleasing melodies.
Instead of writing in the approved ultra-nationalist style, Shostakovich wrote his Fifth Symphony on the model pioneered by Beethoven; he begins his symphony with a sonata, albeit with a hesitant feel. By the third bar of the piece things goes wrong. The music breaks off abruptly and shrugs its way downward to a dead end in an implacable repetition of three notes.
The next theme is derived from a folk song recognizable to the Soviet audience. By changing just one note, however, Shostakovich shifts the meaning of the music. He fulfils the official mandate of celebrating Slavic culture, but the minor shift suggests emotional shadings beyond simple admiration.
More drastic changes of mood come from cutting between extremes of range and instrumentation. The piano and basses lurch in with a version of the dead end theme, followed by winds, brass and percussion. The music becomes militaristic and drives forward. The strings and winds burst out with the sad tunes they played at the beginning. The brass and percussion hammer home what seems to be the ultimate dead end.
The second movement of Symphony No. 5 is drawn from the same goofy, ironic material as his film scores. The movement is a spoof on waltzes. Shostakovich draws a musical picture of a dance floor. There are peasants in their heavy boots, a wise guy on his squeaky clarinet, and a deluxe dance master with his little kit violin.
In the period of Stalin's brutal purges, authorities interpreted crying in public as criticism of the regime's actions and a punishable offense. Despite this, the third movement of the Fifth, a requiem, made many weep openly at its premiere.
An oboe soloist, accompanied by a shiver of strings, plays the loneliest tune in the symphony. The full force of the lament bursts out as the double basses shriek. Then the rest of the orchestra screams into the noise, coming at last to another dead end. As in the first movement, the music wanders its way back to an exhausted close.
Shostakovich lost three close family members to the prison camps. In 1937, Shostakovich himself was summoned for interrogation. Ironically, Shostakovich only escaped because his interrogator was arrested before his appointment came. For the rest of his life Shostakovich had to issue condemnations of other composers, just as they had of him. Often he wrote a piece that mattered to him, only to hide it for years.
With his fate hanging in the balance, Shostakovich had to come up with an upbeat ending for his Fifth Symphony. Concluding with the melancholy of the third movement was not an option. However, the celebratory mood of the fourth movement sounds forced to some ears.
Finally, with a great deal of effort, Shostakovich reveals his triumphant ending. As in the first movement, there is one expressively altered note, though. Not B natural, confirming the happy major version of the scale, but B flat, which delivers the sad minor version.
After so much time making his way to the major scale why does Shostakovich return to minor at the end? Perhaps it is his signal that the happy harmonies of the ending are as false as a Potemkin village.
I've loved Shostakovich's 8th quartet for ages but only just now looked at the score. I imagined the second movement would be a sea of black notes given its breakneck pace and was shocked to see that it's mostly whole, half, and quarter notes. The indicated tempo is whole note = 120 (quarter note would then blaze by at 480 b.p.m.). Second movement is about 5 minutes in.
First of all you should note that this is notated alla breve, so comparing the time to quarters per minutes serves little purpose. Could this have been notated in 2/4? Yes, absolutely! Writing it like this though makes writing and engraving a lot easier, because it avoids beams.
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