Author: Laurel E. Fay
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195182514
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
"Shostakovich's life is a fascinating example of the paradoxes of living as an artist under totalitarian rule. Alone among his artistic peers, he survived successive Stalinist cultural purges and won the Stalin Prize five times, yet in 1948 he was dismissed from his conservatory teaching positions, and many of his works were banned from performance. He prudently censored himself, in one case putting aside a work based on Jewish folk poems. Under later regimes he balanced a career as a model Soviet - holding government positions and acting as an international ambassador - with his unflagging artistic ambitions."--Jacket.

Author: Sofia Moshevich
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773525818
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Dmitri Shoshtakovich (1906–1975) is recognized as one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century yet few people know that he was also an outstanding concert pianist who maintained a hectic performing schedule. In Dmitri Shostakovich, Pianist Sofia Moshevich offers the first detailed examination of Shoshtakovich the pianist within the context of his life and work as a composer. She traces his musical roots, piano studies, repertoire, and concert career through his correspondence with family and friends and his own and his contemporaries' memoirs, using material never before available in English. This biographical narrative is interwoven with analyses of Shoshtakovich's piano and chamber works, demonstrating how he interpreted his own music. For the first time, Shoshtakovich's own recordings are used as primary sources to discover what made his playing unique and to dispel commonly held myths about his style of interpretation. His recorded performances are analysed in detail, specifically his tempos, phrasing, dynamics, pedal, and tonal production. Some unpublished variants of musical texts are included and examples of his interpretations are provided and compared to various editions of his published scores.

Author: David Fanning
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521028318
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
These eleven essays lay a foundation for a proper understanding of Shostakovich's musical language and provide new insights into issues surrounding his composition.

Author: Dethlef Arnemann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jews
Languages : de
Pages : 378

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Book Description

Author: Solomon Volkov
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307427722
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
“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: David Clampitt
Publisher: University Rochester Press
ISBN: 1580463223
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Leading authorities explore, in direct and accessible language, chamber-music masterpieces by twenty-one prominent composers since 1900.

Author: Derek C. Hulme
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 081087265X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 822

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Book Description
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) was one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, as well as the first major Soviet composer. In the fourth edition of Dmitri Shostakovich Catalogue: The First Hundred Years and Beyond, Derek C. Hulme names and describes all known musical compositions of the Russian composer. More than 175 major works are annotated and discussed, including such comprehensive details as titles and subtitles, dates of composition, instrumentation, and duration; information on dedications and premieres; arrangements by the composer and others; publication details; notes on bibliographical references and the location of the autograph score; and comprehensive chronological lists of vinyl, compact disc, and visual recordings. The entries are presented chronologically and by opus number, while indexes of names and compositions provide full accessibility. Several appendixes supplement the volume, guiding readers to further information in published sources and providing information on the composer's film, radio, television, and theatre productions; his abandoned projects and obscure works; and his recordings, including box sets and special USSR recordings. An appendix also discusses the monogram DSCH, a musical motif based on his name that permeates his compositions. This new edition also includes a comprehensive chronological chart of Shostakovich's works and historical events and several plates of memorabilia.

Author: Vladimir Ashkenazy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 796

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Book Description
Establishes beyond any doubt the enormous courage of one of the giants of the age

Author: Natalii͡a Valerʹevna Lukʹi͡anova
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description

Author: Michael Mishra
Publisher: Praeger Pub Text
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
Adopting a two-books-in-one format. The Shostakovich Companion combines a full-length, single-author examination of the life and compositional evolution of the Soviet Union's most famous composer; and a symposium in which a variety of analytical techniques is applied to selected Shostakovich works and genres. This is the first comprehensive English-language book in twenty-five years in which the primary emphasis is on musical issues, and the secondary emphasis is on the biographical and much-debated political issues. The The Shostakovich Companion is divided into four parts. Part I considers the hermeneutic techniques that have been applied to Shostakovich's music, along with the various controversies surrounding his life and his relationship to Soviet politics. Part II comprises the book's central life-and-works discussion, uniting a comprehensive examination of Shostakovich's compositional evolution with a full account of his life. Coming from a variety of authors, the chapters in Part III demonstrate a cross-section of analytical techniques that may usefully be brought to bear upon Shostakovich's music. These range from literary and cinematically-based methods to the more traditional types of musical analysis. Part IV considers three independent but crucial aspects of Shostakovich's life: his contributions to the Soviet film industry, his career as a pianist, and his legacy and influence as a teacher.