ok here we go. i am 21 posts behind, complete fail. i'm also sick, which is why i've put off making posts even though my audition was on monday and got home on tuesday. i've also started working here, so that is enough disincentive for me to be productive when i get home that i pretty much haven't done anything except sleep.
but here we go!
one change i am going to make (at least to try) is to make sets of posts. this relieves some of the difficulty of choosing a whole new work every day and allows me to cover complete works instead of just partial, because a "set" of posts will be comprised of the several movements of a given work.
we'll start with the symphony that played as part of the orchestra this week, shosty 15. this is actually a fantastic symphony and i like it way more than i thought i would. it's dark, personal, and very quiet. it's also very sad. if you give this a listen, do it alone, in a quiet room, with the earphones on and the hand our mouse on the volume control, because chances are the quiet parts will be too quiet for you to hear and the loud parts (there are only three in the whole symphony, all fairly brief) will be too loud for you to want your volume up.
shostakovich's 15th symphony was his last, and once you know this fact you can't help but listen to it with an ear towards death, in a way that i haven't found present with very many pieces (even the ones that have death in them). it is so quiet and so bitter. he was four years from his death (1975, written in 1971) when he wrote it. though that's quite a while, the fact that this was his last symphony is forever going to mean it's the one that faces "the end." amazingly enough this is a view which enriches it so much as to be almost astonishing (and we know a lot of other things about his condition when writing it that make this view make sense anyway). so though in general the music sounds like a lot of other shostakovich music - dry, sardonic, even witty - by the latter movements it just sounds like muted despair, or even resignation. that is, if the tempi are correct - it seems easy to miss this, in favor of something faster and pluckier. this works OK for the first movement, but it's worth having an ear towards how wooden some of this can sound. one of the things that came up during rehearsal for this piece was that many things could - and maybe should - sound so locked in that they were unmusical - and that has a striking sound that can be used to huge effect in this symphony.
he starts off by writing a bent and broken little tune which somehow manages to incorporate rigidified, dry snatches of rossini's william tell overture, as if these cheerful things have become brittle and stale. when prodded by authorities, he originally described it as a toy store, full of grotesque curiosities, but the only true part of this description (which was more a veneer for the sake of political correctness) was the grotesque part. by the time we get to the creepy little mishmash of cross rhythms and vaguely twelve-tone music at 4:23 which soon crescendoes into a sort of crippled climax, we know that there's not really any sense of the innocence or naivete that might be implied by the toy store description. we have to be kept on our toes by the rhythm and meter changes as well, which are not really grating but are unpredictable.
notice the use of percussion - celeste with the two introductory notes, and lots of xylophone solos. shostakovich does some fantastic writing for the percussion section during this symphony - wood block and castanets among the required instruments.
the returning motif of Eb-Ab-C-B-A is said to represent the name of his grandson, sascha. we all know of shosty's penchant for spelling out things in his music, usually his own name (and elmira, in symphony 10), so this is pretty likely.
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