The Program:


Prokofiev: Concerto No. 3
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5




The turmoil of 20th-century Russia produced titans in classical music – from Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky to Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Americans love this big, bold, loud music – as big and bold as the social experiment under way in the big nation that moved, in fast succession, from a cultural hinterland ruled by royalty and superstition to a global superpower whose artists somehow, despite the iron fist of state-sanctioned oppression, managed to contribute some of the world’s most beloved music.



Both Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich suffered from the withering gaze of Josef Stalin, whose “socialistic realism” demanded of all artists an allegiance to the state and its insatiable demand for centralized power. Stalin needed workers who could boost the Soviet economy and adhere to its single-focus beliefs, and he fully intended to use the cultural arm of society as a tool to help achieve that goal and squelch any ideology that ran counter to it. Composers, musicians, novelists, painters and sculptors – all were required to “entertain” the people, to inspire them, to motivate them, to produce in them the energy and desire to work harder, longer – and most of all, strengthen their attachment to the state.



The socialist experiment that began with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the infancy of the Soviet Union seemed promising for artists; to an extent, the arts were seen as a right, not a privilege, for the people, and the state went so far as to support some artists in order to bring more of their work to the masses. But Stalin brought to a different approach to government. His regime made propaganda an art form – literally. The government still supported some artists financially, but the concept of artistic freedom went the way of kings and queens as out-moded forms that didn’t serve the state.



Prokofiev and Shostakovich each responded to the new Soviet system. In Prokofiev’s case, it was with something approaching naivete and surprise at rejection, whereas Shostakovich fared better with a method of advance and retreat. They both sought to serve – not blindly or because they believed in the system, because neither was particularly political -- but because they needed to please, and they needed to create. They needed Stalin’s approbation because they wanted to eat and preferred to live (each lost friends to prison camps and murder). But they also sought to produce music that people loved. And that goal, at least, they achieved.







PIANO CONCERTO NO. 3
By Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)



An expatriate for much of his early career, only moving back to his homeland in 1935, Prokofiev wrote what would become his most famous work during his years abroad. He was a virtuoso pianist with a thoroughly modern style: He doesn’t give us the rich sound of a Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff; he gives us clarity, which is a very modern ideal. In the years he spent in the United States, he was less successful than he’d hoped, and it’s possible that that was because of the popularity of Rachmaninoff; American audiences didn’t require two Russian pianist-composers -- and perhaps chose the more comfortable/romantic ideal of the brooding Rachmaninoff.



Prokofiev’s third piano concerto is muscular; its demands on the soloist are legend. If it is true that a concerto is a conversation between an orchestra and soloist, Prokofiev’s 3rd could be considered an argument – and one in which the pianist fights back. In the first movement, listen for the second theme, which grows in dissonance in the orchestral parts and is then expanded on by the piano. Then watch the pianist’s hands, as she plays several lines of octaves with close tones, then moving up and down the keyboard, hands usually on top of one another. But it’s the third movement that will leave you on the edge of your seat as the coda explodes into a musical battle between soloist and orchestra. Some of the most difficult techniques are required of the pianist here, including clustered-note arpeggios, or playing a chord so that the notes follow one another in fast succession, instead of simultaneously; to achieve this, the artist must sometimes resort to the use of knuckles or forearm instead of fingertips.



This is a beautifully ferocious work. Prokofiev spells us, giving us moments of quiet beauty that are harmoniously satisfying. But then he’s back at it, pouring out whatever it was in his heart and mind that needed expressing – sometimes with dissonance, usually with sheer volume, always in his own inimitable way; no one sounds like Prokofiev.



To the ears of Soviet music critics, Prokofiev often sounded “formalist,” code for “corrupt Westerner,” which was the kiss of death. The composer always faced Stalin’s displeasure with confusion; he believed he was writing what the state wanted -- and using his formidable talents to capacity. What he never understood was that the state didn’t want to challenge the masses; its artistic idealogy resulted in a mediocrity which acted as an opiate to the dissenting spirit. Prokofiev, while he began his career in favor, ended it on the wrong side of the government.



On the same day in 1953, Prokofiev and Stalin died. During the long public viewing of Stalin’s corpse, the Borodin String Quartet – itself a reluctant tool of the Soviet apparatus -- without fanfare or evident sarcasm defiantly played a string quartet by Prokofiev. The state did not officially notice.







SYMPHONY NO. 5
By Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)



Shostakovich, as he matured, wrote three kinds of music: movie soundtracks, which bought food and paid the rent; official works, generally symphonies, that frequently cleaned up whatever mess he’d left with a previous political faux pas; and serious works, almost always chamber music, that he called his “desk drawer” compositions, because that’s where they stayed until after Stalin’s death.



Stalin had a love-hate relationship with Shostakovich, whose first fall from grace occurred in 1936, two years after his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District opened – but just days after Stalin himself finally attended a performance and pronounced it “coarse, primitive and vulgar.” Accused of formalism – again, decadence or corruption -- Shostakovich was pure poison; he was reduced to poverty – and he didn’t stand alone. The Great Terror began in 1936; Shostakovich was luckier than many of his friends and family, who were imprisoned or murdered.



His solution to this denunciation was the Fifth Symphony, written the next year. Its sound is totally acceptable, conservative, even beautiful; it’s still among his most popular works. It was subtitled “a Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism,” and the state loved it; official critics, in fact, worked as hard to rehabilitate the composer’s image as did the composer himself, because it was a show of force: How mighty was the state that could as easily lift a man up as knock him down.



It is said that audiences openly wept during sections of the 5th’s performance, notably during the mournful Largo movement. At this point, there could be hardly any Russian who had not been victimized either directly or indirectly by Stalin’s purges; everyone had lost someone to the gulags or to assassination; everyone had been brought to their knees by the purges of the state.



So Shostakovich lived to write another day – and he fell again, most famously in 1948, when this time, “he waited for his arrest at night out on the landing by the lift, so that at least his family wouldn’t be disturbed.” This pattern of denunciation and punishment, followed by public repentance and rehabilitation followed throughout his career in Stalinist Russia.



Today, in post-perestroika Russia, there is a great nostalgia for the “good old days” of Soviet rule – which, on the face of it, seems inconceivable. Today’s Russia is as full of turmoil as ever, with prevalent organized crime, a stuttering economy and technological growing pains. At least, in the old days, they had bread. And they had Shostakovich.



As we have seen in much of the music from the second half of the season, musical nationalism came of age in modern times as composers embraced their cultural heritage, quoting bits and pieces of folk music or dance music or church music – the music of the people. In the U.S., it rose to prominence with the help of Dvorak and at the hands of native sons Ives and Copland; in Spain, with Rodrigo; in Italy with Respighi. But perhaps nowhere else did it arouse public sentiment the way it did in Russia in the mid- to late-1800s with Glinka, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov.



By the time Prokofiev and Shostakovich came along, musical nationalism in Russia risked corruption by the manipulations of the state. And yet both composers found ways to rise above, to not only write music that contributed to the modern canon, but that also appealed to the masses. “Forced nationalism,” if you will, in the hands of the masters, resulted in music that retained both its authenticity and allegiance to the nation’s culture. The life stories of these two men, whose work is among the most frequently played in U.S. symphony halls today, is proof that the greatest art is crafted in tumultuous times – perhaps because that’s when it is needed most.







-- Notes by Laura Clemons and Dan Allcott