Symphony for the City of the Dead

Symphony for the City of the Dead
Author: M.T. Anderson
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2017-02-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0763691003

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Originally published: Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2015.

How Shostakovich Changed My Mind

How Shostakovich Changed My Mind
Author: Stephen Johnson
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 191074946X

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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.

Shostakovich and Stalin

Shostakovich and Stalin
Author: Solomon Volkov
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307427722

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“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.

Shostakovich

Shostakovich
Author: Brian Morton
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2022-05-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1913368440

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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.

Dmitri Shostakovich Catalogue

Dmitri Shostakovich Catalogue
Author: Derek C. Hulme
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 824
Release: 2010-02-18
Genre: Music
ISBN: 081087265X

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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.

The Noise of Time

The Noise of Time
Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2016-05-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 110194725X

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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.

The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Symphonies

The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Symphonies
Author: Roy Blokker
Publisher:
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1979
Genre: Music
ISBN:

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Bespreking van de verschillende symphonieën van de Russische componist (1906-1975).

The New Shostakovich

The New Shostakovich
Author: Ian MacDonald
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2006
Genre: Music
ISBN: 184595064X

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Since the posthumous publication in 1979 of alleged memoirs by Shostakovich, the controversy about the composer and his music has escalated. This book presents the case for the dissident view, arguing that the meaning of the composer's music cannot be appreciated without a knowledge of the terrible times he lived through under Soviet Communism.

Shostakovich

Shostakovich
Author: Elizabeth Wilson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 550
Release: 1995
Genre: Composers
ISBN: 9780571174867

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Shostakovich: A Life Remembered is a unique study of the great composer, drawn from the reminiscences and reflections of his contemporaries. Elizabeth Wilson sheds light on the composer's creative process and his working life in music, and examines the enormous and enduring influence that Shostakovich has had on Soviet musical life. 'The one indispensable book about the composer.' New York Times

Story of a Friendship

Story of a Friendship
Author: Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2001
Genre: Composers
ISBN: 9780801439797

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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.