The Dresden Philharmonie Orchestra There have been advocates for his later concertos, but in truth Bruch never recaptured the spontaneous rapture of this romantic warhorse. Sadly, he sold the rights for the work cheaply early on and its unending popularity (together with his failure to live up to the Inspiration of the G minor Concerto) was a source of bitter regret in the later years of his long life. Like his close Contemporary Saint-Saens (1835-1921), Bruch remained oblivious to the developments in music across Europe at the turn of the nineteenth Century and he died virtually in poverty and oblivion in 1920. Bruch’s G minor Concerto owes much to Mendelssohn’s E minor Concerto, just as Grieg’s A minor Piano Concerto is similarly indebted to Schumann’s in the same key. The Concertos by Bruch and Grieg are often paired together with their respective role models. Perhaps the original models do strike deeper chords, but there is no denying the sheer romantic attraction of the two works inspired by the timeless masterpieces of Mendelssohn and Schumann. Timothy Dowling, July 2017 Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Opus 47 (1937) 1. Moderato 2. Allegretto 3. Largo 4. Allegro non troppo The ultimate political symphony - a matter of life or death... Until recent years the Fifth Symphony usually appeared with the subtitle A Soviet artist’s Creative reply to just criticism’, with the assumption that these words were penned by the composer himself. It was only made clear in later years that these words were actually written by a reviewer following the first performance of the Symphony in Moscow in 1938. However, Shostakovich appears to have been happy to allow the words to be affixed, although his inner feelings about the subtitle were undoubtedly ambivalent, to say the least. Shostakovich had bürst onto the musical landscape of Soviet Russia with his youthful First Symphony, composed as a graduation exercise in 1925 when he was a 19-year-old Student. His next two symphonies, The First of May and To October respectively, commemorated the events of 1917, and both concluded with celebratory settings of revolutionary texts. Shostakovich scored a major critical success with the 1934 premiere of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. He then embarked on the composition of his Fourth Symphony in 1935, basking in the triumph of his opera and enjoying the artistic experimentation that marked the early years of the Soviet Union. In August 1934 the Union of Soviet Writers Conference discussed the role of literature in the USSR. Later in the same year Sergei Prokofiev (who was just about to return to the Soviet Union) pondered the role of music in the USSR in the wake of the emerging doctrine of Socialist Realism: ‘The question as to what kind of music should be written at the present time is one of great concern to many Soviet composers. I have given considerable thought to the problem in the past two years and I believe that the correct solution would be the following. ‘What is needed above all is great music, Le., music that would correspond both in form and in content to the grandeur of the epoch. Such music would be a Stimulus to our own musical development, and abroad too it would reveal ourtrue selves. The danger of becoming provincial is unfortunately a very real one for modern Soviet composers.
