Shostakovich's Symphony No. 6

What are you going to listen to?

Max Knigge

Opening tonight is the latest work by Dutch composer Max Knigge. Eliza May is named after the main character in the novel The Song of Stork and Dromedary by Anjet Daanje, the biggest literary hit of the Last years. Knigge sets several scenes from the book to music. Knigge: "I was completely captivated by the mysterious and fascinating world surrounding the character Eliza May Drayden. According to Knigge, the book "is about loneliness, sisters, role-playing in social interaction, gossip, the landscape of Yorkshire. And death is a connecting factor. Death as a concrete event, which certainly in the nineteenth century was a constantly looming presence. That is a dreary idea, but death is also the engine of existence, the event that puts life in perspective." Knigge wrote a suite, which consists of five movements but are played back-to-back, creating one movement. "Five is an important number in the book; it appears on almost every page. The parts include the hill that is heaven for Eliza May, the textile factory that stands opposite it as hell on earth and the post office where the villagers meet to gossip. I find the sketch of the village and its inhabitants, how people talk and think about each other and themselves, shaping their reality, one of the most fascinating aspects of the novel."

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."