Symphony No. 4 (Shostakovich)

The Symphony No. 4 in C minor ( Opus 43) by Dmitri Shostakovich was started in 1934. However, Shostakovich was dissatisfied with the original ideas for his Fourth Symphony and rejected his initial work. In September 1935, he began again to work on the symphony and completed it in May 1936.

History

Semi-finished with his composition, the composer at the infamous Pravda editorial denounced " Muddle Instead of Music " of the formalism. Nevertheless, Shostakovich continued to work on the symphony and announced his critics that this his fourth symphony would be the "Credo of their composers ." Following this announcement told his best friend, the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky, at a meeting of the Composers' Association, that the Fourth Symphony save the composer and it would turn out to be Shostakovich's " Eroica ".

Despite these very dangerous and difficult times Shostakovich pressed on with his plans, the symphony, as soon as it was possible for him to premiere. Finally, the Symphony was adopted as the appearance of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic and the date of the premiere was set at 30 December 1936. Should Conducting the then music director, Fritz Stiedry. Shostakovich was also Otto Klemperer promise to perform the symphony for the first time outside the USSR.

What happened next remains unclear. At one point during the rehearsal of the fourth symphony of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra Shostakovich decided to withdraw the symphony, with the assertion that he felt the finale would require a revision. He would later give different explanations for why he withdrew his Fourth Symphony. In an interview in the late 1950s Shostakovich stated that he withdrew the symphony, because he felt the symphony as a whole would suffer under a " Grandiosomanie ", although there were parts in the work that appealed to him. Later still, he should say that he withdrew the symphony, because Fritz Stiedry during the trial organized a horrible mess with the symphony. Recently named Shostakovich's friend Isaac Glikman in his book Diary of a friendship than real reason why the symphony was withdrawn to take the pressure exerted by party chairman pressure on the manager of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the symphony from the sample plan. He also defended Fritz Stiedrys musicianship against Shostakovich's claim of incompetence. Soon after the fiasco surrounding the withdrawal of the Fourth Symphony wandered Fritz Stiedry to the United States. Stiedry would later be a successful resident conductor for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

During the early and mid- 1940s, Shostakovich longed for the premiere of his Fourth Symphony and wrote a reduction of the work for two pianos, in order to show the symphony interested musicians can. Shostakovich and his fellow composer Mieczysław Weinberg premiered this version for two pianos at a meeting of the Composers' Association in 1946. Nevertheless, Shostakovich was undertaking to perform the orchestral version, to no avail. The orchestral score was lost. As a librarian for the St. Petersburg Philharmonic took place in the early 1960s, the orchestral parts in the archives of the orchestra, the score was note for note reconstructed. The Fourth Symphony was then entrusted to the conductor Kirill Kondrashin and premiered late on December 30, 1961 by the Moscow Philharmonic. This artist performed the Fourth Symphony in 1962 also at the Edinburgh Festival. The German premiere was in 1963 in Dresden with the Dresden Staatskapelle under Kirill Kondrashin.

Music

The work has a duration of about one hour and three sets:

Shostakovich requires a huge orchestra for the work with over a hundred musicians. The technical and emotional demands on the musicians are enormous.

The symphony is called strongly influenced the reception as of Gustav Mahler. Meanwhile, third symphony is Shostakovich as a model for the first sentence: "To my amazement and joy I see in the ( first) one, as in the whole work the same framework, the same knotting - without that I would have let alone planned it wanted - as found in Mozart and, in a broader and more sophisticated form in Beethoven; it is the same idea, which actually began with the old Haydn. There needs to be profound and eternal laws, to be held Beethoven and that I see as a kind of confirmation in my work. "This written by Mahler on his third symphony words could just as well for the first set of Shostakovich's Fourth fit. What at first appears as uncontrolled flood of musical ideas is a strictly organized, but unique executed movement in sonata form, on closer inspection. Only three themes serve as a scaffold for the first set.

One of the most remarkable parts of the first movement is a furious fugato Presto for Strings, eventually covering the entire orchestra and reaches its climax in a shear -like five times forte tutti. The second movement is a scherzo -like ländler, which is held in a deceptively simple ABABA form. This eerie Scherzo, which at times serves as a reminder of the Scherzi from Mahler's second and seventh symphony ends with a percussion motif that is used in the second Shostakovich Cello Concerto and the fifteenth symphony again. The third and last set is probably one of the most complex and most bizarre of Shostakovich symphonic creations. A funeral march begins the sentence. This results in a violent toccata, the multiple reordering of to a kind of grotesque Divertimento, which contains a known Solo for trombone almost cartoon -like gaiety. The Divertimento makes room for a brutal Choralreminiszenz the coda of Gavriil Popov's first symphony. It reaches a deafening climax, as the funeral march comes back from the beginning of the sentence, the music finally makes the death- tinged coda place. With echoes of Tchaikovsky Pathethique and Gustav Mahler The Song of the Earth, the symphony finally pulsates morendo into the darkness on a bare c -minor pedal point.

Recordings

Recordings of the work include, without limitation:

Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra / Kirill Kondrashin ( Melodiya )
Staatskapelle Dresden / Kirill Kondrashin (profile ( record label ) )
Orchestra of the Bolschoi-Theaters/Gennadi Rozhdestvensky (Russian Disc)
Symphony Orchestra of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR / Gennady Rozhdestvensky ( Melodiya )
Philadelphia Orchestra / Eugene Ormandy (Sony)
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Sir Simon Rattle (EMI )
Kirow-Orchester/Waleri Gergiev (Philips)
WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln / Semyon Bychov ( Avie )
SWR Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart / Andrey Boreyko ( Haenssler Classic )
The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra / Mariss Jansons (EMI )
Scottish National Orchestra / Neeme Järvi ( Chandos )
Gürzenich-Orchester/Dmitri Kitajenko ( Capriccio )
Philadelphia Orchestra / Chung Myung- whun ( German Grammophon )
Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Andre Previn (EMI )
London Philharmonic Orchestra / Bernard Haitink ( Decca )
St. Louis Symphony Orchestra / Leonard Slatkin (RCA / BMG )
Prague Symphony Orchestra / Maxim Shostakovich ( Supraphon )
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Vladimir Ashkenazy ( Decca )
Radio -Sinfonieorchester Leipzig / Herbert Kegel ( farsightedness )
Colin Stone and Rustem Hairudinoff, pianist ( Arrangement for Two Pianos) ( Decca )
WDR Symphony Orchestra / Rudolf Barshai (Brilliant Classics )
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra / Vasily Petrenko ( Naxos)
National Symphony Orchestra, Washington DC / Mstislav Rostropovich ( Andante)
Verdi Symphony Orchestra of Milan / Oleg Caetani ( Arts)

The last two recordings include performances of the obtained original sketches of the first movement of the fourth symphony.

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