shostakovich

Founded by four ambitious teenagers in Middlesbrough in 1972, the Brodsky Quartet’s extraordinary fifty-year career has encompassed collaborations with musicians including Sting, Björk and Sir Paul McCartney as well as a whole host of superb recordings of core repertoire from Mozart to Bartók.

It was a great pleasure to be joined by cellist and founder-member Jacqueline Thomas and her husband Paul Cassidy (who became the quartet’s viola-player in the early 1980s) for a whistle-stop tour through the group’s first five decades, not least because the pair had such a profound direct influence on my own development as a young musician growing up in Middlesbrough during the 1990s – in between touring with Elvis Costello and recording a landmark cycle of the Shostakovich quartets, they regularly carved out time to return to the area to coach aspiring chamber-groups and perform concertos with local amateur orchestras, experiences which will stay with me for life.  

Join us for a trip down memory-lane, taking in their early days feverishly transcribing Janáček and Shostakovich direct from radio-broadcasts, game-changing encounters with Japanese designer Issey Miyake, Costello and *Line of Duty* star Adrian Dunbar, and the process of documenting the quartet's history in their recently-published twin autobiographies...

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In the aftermath of the Soviet war victory, ideological control was tightened again, contrary to expectations. The six leading Soviet composers (including Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Myaskovsky and Khachaturian) were censured and humiliated by a Party Resolution against 'formalism'. 

This is a story of necessary retreat and compromise, but also of resilience and survival, when even under great pressure, composers produced works of deep lyricism and humanity.

It will feature performances from:  Laura van der Heijden (cellist) and Petr Limonov (pianist).

A lecture by Marina Frolova-Walker

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/1948-music

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
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The tribulations of WWII (the “Great Patriotic War”) prompted a temporary liberalisation within Soviet culture. Images of horror and grief, formerly unacceptable, found their way into the wartime music of Soviet composers. The debate over Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony showed how the boundaries of Socialist Realism could be stretched, but also where the limits lay. 

The lecture will also discuss some works on Jewish themes (by Shostakovich, Weinberg and Gnessin) and their complex connection to the War and to the Holocaust.

A lecture by Marina Frolova-Walker

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/soviet-war-music

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

This lecture focuses on one of the watershed moments of Soviet music history: the censure of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and the composer’s path through reform to rehabilitation. 

The Shostakovich story was only the tip of the iceberg, and almost all Soviet composers had to adjust their aesthetic and style at this point, unless they were prepared to languish in obscurity and poverty.

Shostakovich's Songs on the Texts of English Poets is performed by Bass Ed Hawkins and the pianist Ceri Owen.

A lecture by Marina Frolova-Walker with performances from Ed Hawkins (Bass) and Ceri Owen (Piano)

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/shostakovich-trial

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Description
Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony was composed amidst significant upheaval during the “Great Patriotic War” which began in 1941. No composer before Shostakovich had ever written a symphony during a raging war, “and no composer had ever attempted to describe a future victory, in music, with such power and conviction.” Join me, as we take a minute to get the scoop!

Fun Fact
Shostakovich’s “War Symphony” was finally performed on 9 August 1942 in Leningrad. A playwright in the audience wrote, “People who no longer knew how to shed tears of sorrow and misery now cried from sheer joy. It was not an impression, but a staggering experience.” The siege of Leningrad was finally lifted two years later, but almost one million of the city’s civilian population had by then perished.

About Steven
Steven is a Canadian composer living in Toronto. He creates a range of works, with an emphasis on the short-form genre—his muse being to offer the listener both the darker and more satiric shades of human existence. If you're interested, please check out his website for more.

A Note To Music Students et al.
All recordings and sheet music are available on my site. I encourage you to take a look and play through some. Give me a shout if you have any questions.

Got a topic? Pop me off an email at: TCMMPodcast@Gmail.com 

Each of the pieces on the Seattle Symphony program this week have very personal associations for Music Director Thomas Dausgaard. He led Grieg’s ”Peer Gynt Suite” at his professional conducting debut.  He was a young cellist in a Copenhagen youth symphony when he first played the Carl Nielsen First Symphony. And as he told Classical KING FM’s Dave Beck this week, his experience in the Russian dacha where Shostakovich once composed string quartets left a deep impression on the young conductor Thomas Dausgaard.

By popular demand, we present a full-length guide to the bass clarinet, presented by Philharmonia Orchestra Principal Bass Clarinet, Laurent Ben Slimane.

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Intro

00:48 – What is a bass clarinet?

01:13 – How do you put it together?

02:33 – How does the sound get created?

03:55 – How does the pitch get changed?

04:43 – What is a transposing instrument?

05:08 – How did you get started on the bass clarinet?

05:50 – What are the keys like?

06:36 – How do you hold your instrument?

08:35 – Playing other woodwind instruments

08:57 – Doubling on other clarinets

09:49 – Articulations

10:34 – Embouchure & Puffing Cheeks

12:39 – Special techniques

14:04 – Tchaikovsky, Manfred Symphony

14:46 – Shostakovich, Violin Concerto No. 1, Scherzo

15:31 – Shostakovich, 7th Symphony

17:35 – Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring

19:17 – Richard Strauss, Don Quixote

21:08 – Learning the bass clarinet

21:40 – Different models

Watch the full instrument playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqR22EoucCyccs5J639SCefaM7mD9dMSz

Subscribe: www.youtube.com/philharmonialondon  

The Apollo Chamber Players and Erberk Eryilmaz take us on an international musical journey in Europe and the Middle East.