Testimony Book
This article attempts to reconstruct the persona of the ‘Old Shostakovich’ in Britain—the pre-Testimony Shostakovich that is now a distant memory. Through examining widely disseminated sources such as newspaper reviews, radio broadcasts, articles in popular magazines, and programme notes, it traces Shostakovich's reception history in a culture that effected a shift from staunchly defending music's independence from politics to insisting upon political readings of Shostakovich's music. The reconstruction of the history of Shostakovich's British reception charts a range of changing attitudes: critical responses to the role of music in society; Britain's growing awareness of the social and cultural effects of Stalinism; and—most important—Shostakovich's developing stature as his music became more frequently played. Given the scale of this task, the article focuses on the reception of the Fifth Symphony, arguably the work that has accumulated the heaviest layer of interpretative commentary and has been the most controversial in Britain from its first performance there in 1939 until the present day.
Dmitri Shostakovich Pronunciation
- Of Russia and a masterful composer. It was not until the publication in 1979 of a book called Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich surfaced that debates began to take form that would eventually charge into the realm of violent disputes from many sides. This book, written by Solomon Volkov, portrayed Shostakovich as a bitter dissident.
- The personal story, presumably authentic, of the Russian composer's struggle with himself and the constraints of the system to which he had to conform. A powerful searchlight that illuminates Soviet society and the relationship between creative art and political power in the Stalinist period and after.
- Tony Palmer's 1988 film on the life, times and music of the Soviet composer, with Ben Kingsley as Shostakovich and Terence Rigby as Stalin. Ronald Pickup, Jo.
Testimony Shostakovich Book
Download mac os yosemite installer. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) is now generally regarded as one of the great composers of our time, but his reputation, at least in the West, was not always so high. Thereby hangs a complex tale involving questions about his personal conduct as a citizen of a totalitarian society and the way that conduct did or did not affect the music he wrote. While Testimony, the supposed 'Memoir' of Dmitri Shostakovich, has been long discredited, it continues to poison the legitimacy of Shostakovich study and remains an object of faith in certain.