Category: Back In The USSR

I’m unfamiliar with this YouTuber–this popped up in my feed yesterday.  He’s kind of annoying, but it’s a decent summary of Shostakovich and his appeal.  As a former Shosta-kid and Shost-adult, and a current Shosta-senior, I feel obliged to pass it along.  If you’re interested, start with his 5th and 10th symphonies.  Something shorter and lighter is his 9th, an ironic, smart-ass middle finger to the authorities, who were expecting a grand triumphal celebration of the end of WWII (his 7th had done much to bolster the spirits of the residents of Leningrad while it was under siege by the Nazis).  Hearing the 5th-8th and 10th symphonies live by a world-class orchestra is a sonic KO similar to a Who concert.  More cerebral are his 24 Preludes & Fugues, inspired by Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.  Give those a shot if you think modernized Bach might be your thing.  His later symphonies and string quartets are very grim affairs, pretty much music to slit your wrists by.  He’d spent his career alternating between appeasing and fucking with the Kremlin (sometines both simultaneously), and it left him embittered.

I was confused by the narrator’s comment that he and his friends couldn’t come by a recording of the 5th.  Wherever he grew up in Texas must have been remote.  Most record stores had at least small classical sections, and all of them would have had at least one copy of the 5th, probably Bernstein’s.