RO NOW: Shostakovich's Symphony No. 6

What are you going to listen to?

Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony, a masterpiece of edginess and introspection and Grieg's Piano Concerto, a brilliant dialogue between piano and orchestra, steeped in romanticism and northern fervor. A real treat for your weekend.

Edvard Grieg

Although it was recognized early on that Edvard Grieg possessed musical talent - he was taught piano and theory by his mother from the age of six - it was the famous Norwegian violinist Ole Bull who convinced Grieg's parents to let their fifteen-year-old son study at the Leipzig conservatory. During his first year of study in 1858, he heard Clara Schumann perform her late husband Robert's Piano Concerto. Deeply impressed, he decided to write a piano concerto himself although it was another ten years before Grieg put the plan into action. Meanwhile, he had been back in his homeland for some time where he had been profoundly influenced by Norwegian folk music. So too in his Piano Concerto whose final rondo is based on a well-known Norwegian folk dance, the "halling.

The 1869 premiere in Copenhagen was a great success, although Grieg, due to commitments elsewhere, did not play the solo part. He himself, however, was far from satisfied, and in the years that followed he revised the work no fewer than seven times, the Last only a few weeks before his death in 1907. The Piano Concerto ended up being the only solo concerto Grieg wrote. He did begin a second concerto in 1882, but left it at only a few sketches.

Dmitri Shostakovich

It was only barely a year ago that Dmitri Shostakovich had rehabilitated himself with his Fifth Symphony with the Soviet authorities, when he announced in the Journal of Literature that he planned to compose a vocal-instrumental symphony in memory of Lenin: "It is an incredibly difficult task to portray the titanic stature of the leader in music, and I am acutely aware of this. Therefore, when I talk about my symphony, I see that its basis is not in historical events or biographical facts, but very generally in the higher idea of the work. I have long been intensely concerned with the idea of how the stature of the leader can be expressed by musical means. I designed my symphony as a work for orchestra, chorus and soloists. I have carefully studied all the poetry and prose in honor of Vladimir Ilyich."

Repeatedly Shostakovich announced works he had no intention of writing at all, in order to gain time and work on something else in peace. In the years 1938-1939, he actually worked on the purely instrumental Sixth Symphony, which was completely overshadowed at the Festival of Soviet Music in Moscow by the success of Prokofiev's patriotic cantata "Alexander Nevsky. The Soviet authorities convened a meeting on the symphony immediately after its premiere on Nov. 5, 1939. Conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky was convinced though and performed the symphony repeatedly and so did Leopold Stokowski, who premiered the work abroad: "In each symphony, Shostakovich shows himself as a master who continuously develops his creative imagination and musical self-awareness. He reaches new heights in the Sixth Symphony, especially in the first movement, where the succession of harmonic and melodic turns acquires a special expressiveness and original timbre. At first hearing, these turns sound strange, perhaps even incomprehensible, as if they want to hide their meaning from us. On repeated listening, however, everything becomes clear, everything gains tremendous depth."