Shostakovich

Author : M.T. Anderson
Publisher : Candlewick Press
ISBN 13 : 0763691003
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Symphony for the City of the Dead written by M.T. Anderson and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2015.

Author : Stephen Johnson
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 191074946X
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How Shostakovich Changed My Mind written by Stephen Johnson and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful look at the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness, including author Stephen Johnson's struggle with bipolar disorder. BBC music broadcaster Stephen Johnson explores the power of Shostakovich’s music during Stalin’s reign of terror, and writes of the extraordinary healing effect of music on sufferers of mental illness. Johnson looks at neurological, psychotherapeutic and philosophical findings, and reflects on his own experience, where he believes Shostakovich’s music helped him survive the trials and assaults of bipolar disorder. There is no escapism, no false consolation in Shostakovich’s greatest music: this is some of the darkest, saddest, at times bitterest music ever composed. So why do so many feel grateful to Shostakovich for having created it—not just Russians, but westerners like Stephen Johnson, brought up in a very different, far safer kind of society? The book includes interviews with the members of the orchestra who performed Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony during the siege of that city.

Author : Solomon Volkov
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0307427722
Total Pages : 307 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shostakovich and Stalin written by Solomon Volkov and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Music illuminates a person and provides him with his last hope; even Stalin, a butcher, knew that.” So said the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose first compositions in the 1920s identified him as an avant-garde wunderkind. But that same singularity became a liability a decade later under the totalitarian rule of Stalin, with his unpredictable grounds for the persecution of artists. Solomon Volkov—who cowrote Shostakovich’s controversial 1979 memoir, Testimony—describes how this lethal uncertainty affected the composer’s life and work. Volkov, an authority on Soviet Russian culture, shows us the “holy fool” in Shostakovich: the truth speaker who dared to challenge the supreme powers. We see how Shostakovich struggled to remain faithful to himself in his music and how Stalin fueled that struggle: one minute banning his work, the next encouraging it. We see how some of Shostakovich’s contemporaries—Mandelstam, Bulgakov, and Pasternak among them—fell victim to Stalin’s manipulations and how Shostakovich barely avoided the same fate. And we see the psychological price he paid for what some perceived as self-serving aloofness and others saw as rightfully defended individuality. This is a revelatory account of the relationship between one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers and one of its most infamous tyrants.

Author : Roy Blokker
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Symphonies written by Roy Blokker and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bespreking van de verschillende symphonieën van de Russische componist (1906-1975).

Author : Brian Morton
Publisher : Haus Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1913368440
Total Pages : 197 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shostakovich written by Brian Morton and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of popular twentieth-century Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Internationally esteemed, Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich is widely considered to have been the last great classical symphonist, and his reputation has continued to increase since his death in 1975. Shostakovich wrote his First Symphony at the age of nineteen, then he soon embarked on a dual career as a concert pianist and composer. His early avant-gardism resulted in the triumph of his 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Though at first highly praised by Stalin, Shostakovich would later suffer from a complex and brutalizing relationship with the Soviet dictator and the governments that followed him. Despite this persecution, his Seventh Symphony was embraced as a potent symbol of Russian resistance to the invading Nazi army in both the USSR and the West. Though his later years were marked by ill health, his rate of composition remained prolific. His music became increasingly beloved as he established himself as the most popular composer of serious music in the middle of the twentieth century.

Author : Julian Barnes
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 110194725X
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Noise of Time written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes an extraordinary fictional portrait of the relentlessly fascinating Russian musician and composer Dmitri Shostakovich and a stunning meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society. • “Brilliant…. As elegantly constructed as a concerto.” —NPR 1936: Dmitri Shostakovich, just thirty years old, reckons with the first of three conversations with power that will irrevocably shape his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has suddenly denounced the young composer’s latest opera. Certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, his daughter—all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, he will twice more be swept up by the forces of despotism: coerced into praising the Soviet state at a cultural conference in New York in 1948, and finally bullied into joining the Party in 1960. All the while, he is compelled to constantly weigh the specter of power against the integrity of his music.

Author : Solomon Volkov
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062987852
Total Pages : 575 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Testimony written by Solomon Volkov and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed classical composer chronicles his life and work in twentieth-century Soviet Russia with the help of a distinguished musicologist. Since the time of his death, Dmitri Shostakovich’s place in the pantheon of twentieth-century composers has become more commanding and more celebrated, while his musical legacy, with all its wonderfully varied richness, is performed with increasing frequency throughout the world. This seemingly endless surge of interest can be attributed, at least in part, to Testimony, the powerful memoirs the ailing compose dictated to the young Russian musicology Solomon Volkov. When Testimony was first published in the West in 1979, it became an international bestseller, and was called the “book of the year” by The Times in London. The Guardian heralded Testimony as “the most influential music book of the 20th century.” Testimony offers a chance to reckon with the life and work of one of history’s most lauded musical geniuses—as a man and an artist.

Author : Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801439797
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Story of a Friendship written by Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This choice by the composer's close friend Isaak Glikman brought the tormented feelings of the musical genius into public view. Now those feelings resound in the first substantial collection of Shostakovich's letters to appear in English.

Author : Malcolm Hamrick Brown
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 025305625X
Total Pages : 407 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Shostakovich Casebook written by Malcolm Hamrick Brown and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of writings analyzing the controversial 1979 posthumous memoirs of the great Russian composer at their significance. In 1979, the alleged memoirs of legendary composer Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975) were published as Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitry Shostakovich As Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov. Since its appearance, however, Testimony has been the focus of controversy in Shostakovich studies as doubts were raised concerning its authenticity and the role of its editor, Volkov, in creating the book. A Shostakovich Casebook presents twenty-five essays, interviews, newspaper articles, and reviews—many newly available since the collapse of the Soviet Union—that review the “case” of Shostakovich. In addition to authoritatively reassessing Testimony’s genesis and reception, the authors in this book address issues of political influence on musical creativity and the role of the artist within a totalitarian society. Internationally known contributors include Richard Taruskin, Laurel E. Fay, and Irina Antonovna Shostakovich, the composer’s widow. This volume combines a balanced reconsideration of the Testimony controversy with an examination of what the controversy signifies for all music historians, performers, and thoughtful listeners. Praise for A Shostakovich Casebook “A major event . . . This Casebook is not only about Volkov’s Testimony, it is about music old and new in the 20th century, about the cultural legacy of one of that century’s most extravagant social experiments, and what we have to learn from them, not only what they ought to learn from us.” —Caryl Emerson, Princeton University

Author : Pauline Fairclough
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1789141907
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dmitry Shostakovich written by Pauline Fairclough and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dmitry Shostakovich was one of the most successful composers of the twentieth century—a musician who adapted as no other to the unique pressures of his age. By turns vilified and feted by Stalin during the Great Purge, Shostakovich twice came close to succumbing to the whirlwind of political repression of his times and remained under political surveillance all his life, despite the many privileges and awards heaped upon him in old age. Through it all, Shostakovich showed a remarkable ability to work with, rather than against, prevailing ideological demands, and it was this quality that ensured both his survival and his musical posterity. Pauline Fairclough’s absorbing new biography offers a vivid portrait of Shostakovich. Featuring quotations from previously unpublished letters as well as rarely seen photographs, Fairclough’s book provides fresh insight into the music and life of a composer whose legacy, above all, was to have written some of the greatest and most cherished music of the last century.