“Next Saturday, Nov. 9, marks three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” writes Jeremy Eichler in last Thursday’s )10/31) Boston Globe. “This week, whether by design or by coincidence, the BSO will be ringing in the anniversary of the fall of the Wall with the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. As the orchestra prepares to resume its multi-year project of performing and recording Shostakovich’s complete symphonies … I’ve been thinking about how we approach this extraordinary body of work today, how and why the music retains its surprisingly wide appeal, and how the meanings of this music seem to morph over time. In order to survive the perilous central decades of the 20th century, Shostakovich (1906-75) wrote music that remains, to this day, staggeringly multivalent. In its time the works had to speak with enough clarity of official meaning to please the Party censors while also somehow speaking beyond them, to address everyday citizens directly. For his embattled countrymen, his music—at its best—held up a mirror to the grim daily realities of Soviet existence … Shostakovich’s art speaks … with a specificity of personal meaning all the more powerful for being voiced in the abstract and untranslatable language of music.”
Posted November 7, 2019
