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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

Composer of the Week - Brand

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Composer of the Week: Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975): Episode 5: The Two Shostakoviches

Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Episode 5

Episode 5: The Two Shostakoviches

The Two Shostakoviches

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975), The Two Shostakoviches

Donald Macleod focuses on Shostakovich's String Quartet No 15.

Donald Macleod focuses on Shostakovich's String Quartet No 15, a work which expressed powerfully in music the dissidence the composer was incapable of expressing in his public life.

Donald Macleod views Shostakovich through the prism of his string quartets. Donald Macleod views Shostakovich through the prism of his string quartets; his 15th expressed powerfully in music the dissidence he was incapable of expressing in his public life.
Since the official battering he had received for his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Shostakovich had been at pains to toe the party line. During the Stalin era this was understandable enough - it was a matter of sheer survival. But after Stalin's death there was, in relative terms, something of a thaw, and dissident voices began to be heard. Shostakovich's was emphatically not one of them - in fact he became more than ever the party loyalist, accepting all sorts of official posts and duties and even adding his name to an open letter attacking the nuclear physicist and civil-rights activist Andrei Sakharov. The only language in which Shostakovich was prepared to express dissidence was the elusive, ambiguous, indefinable language of music. So there grew up in Russia the notion of "the two Shostakoviches" - one daring and progressive, the other, frankly, a coward. Shostakovich subtitled the first movement of his 15th Symphony 'The Toyshop', but it quickly becomes clear that this creepy, eerie toyshop is no place for children. The profoundly melancholy 15th String Quartet - one of the composer's last major works - is a relentless procession of six Adagios, in which Shostakovich completes the journey to the interior he had begun with his 1st String Quartet nearly four decades earlier.

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Donald Macleod views Dmitry Shostakovich through the prism of his string quartets

Donald Macleod views Dmitry Shostakovich through the prism of his string quartets, which he began writing relatively late in his career

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Episode 5: The Two Shostakoviches

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