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I have to admit I’m a little surprised by the comments on my last post, which was about the way we in classical music grasp for relevance by programming concerts built around things in history — Shostakovich and Stalin, for instance — that not many people care much about. And thereby showing how not relevant we are.
The response surprised me. But then after more than 30 years as a professional writer I know that even smart and sympathetic readers don’t always get the full meaning of everything they read. And that, often enough, this is the writer’s fault.
So, for whatever reason, the commenters read my post, and objected that Shostakovich’s life under the Soviet regime really is relevant history, that we have artists repressed today, that we have painful controls in many places on what can be expressed, and that we need to think and talk about these things.
I wouldn’t disagree. But my point was that programming that headlines Shostakovich and Stalin — that makes them the main attraction — won’t get people talking. People won’t come. The names won’t provoke much reaction. Maybe once people do talk about repression and freedom, then they’ll be fascinated by Soviet history from 80 years ago.
But before that, they won’t be. But just saying, no matter how loudly, “Shostakovich and Stalin!” won’t make them come to performances highlighting this history. Or buy CDs that invoke it.
The academic route
One estimable orchestra organized a symposium about S & S, which I’m sure interested some people who don’t normally go to the orchestra’s concerts. And in other ways may have bolstered the orchestra’s place in its community (or, more precisely, in certain parts of its community). And may have been absorbing to attend.
I couldn’t object to such an event. As part of a larger strategy to make the orchestra flourish, it has its place. But the main goal of any such strategy has to be to sell tickets. To make the orchestra so hot in its community that people — including many who don’t go to symphonic concerts now — look at its programs and say, “Wow! Look what they’re doing Thursday night! I’ve got to be there!”
I’d be amazed if Shostakovich and Stalin could do that. People should be interested, maybe, but right now they aren’t. Contrast the likely (or anyway possible) reaction if the concert instead were about ISIS. Or, as I said in response to the comments, about the restrictions on teaching evolution in high schools that some states impose. These at least are current issues, things that people currently talk about.
But then what music would we play, to bring those issues alive?
Current relevance is a long discussion. But we’ve got to start having it.
Here’s an idea: Before classical organizations decide what their audience wants, maybe they can actually ask the audience. I know it’s not that simple. Neither is it cheap if done right. But there are ways. And I think if they do so, classical organizations may be surprised at how their own artistic and cultural preoccupations are not shared, or sometimes even understood, but their audience. As a classical focus group of one, I can tell you that I’ve had it up to my earlobes with somber commemorations, and would choose fresh, engaging and intelligent entertainment over such grim fare any day.
I’m 100% with you on this!
We might be in violent agreement.
In my comment to your post yesterday, I felt that the DGG folks missed the chance to make their new release more relevant because they didn’t link it to parallel contemporary experience. The Shostakovich-Stalin topic alone, however heroic, would NOT be very relevant unless linked to more recent events that touch on the broader issue of artistic/personal repression. The historic events can be telescoped to our time, and the point can be made that a particular issue has always been with us or influences us to this day. Something like that.
Likewise, a concert with the Shostakovich works could similarly be linked to the wider, and more topical, issue of freedom of expression in general, etc, and be advertised that way. I agree that without using some contextual link to the current environment, there would be less interest and we lose a chance to show relevance and some universal aspects of artistic expression, etc. Furthermore, the concert, or album, could include more recent works that deal directly with more contemporary analogies, such as Boyer’s “Ellis Island”, Danielpour’s Requiem, or something of El-Khoury.
On the flip side, how would one release a new CD of the Shostakovich and NOT make mention of its origins/history/setting? And if they must at least mention it, they should then link it to today somehow.
Big question, the one you ended with. But the short answer would be to release fewer Shostakovich recordings (same with all the old classical rep), and when we do release one, to go far deeper into his catalogue. And then to treat the history in far more depth. To give one quick example, Lady Macbeth. Routine to say the opera was banned by Stalin. But the wider history is far more interesting. Stalin didn’t hear the piece or react to it until two years after the premiere. During that time, the opera was a smash hit. More than 50 performances each year at the Leningrad theater that premiered it.
Meanwhile Shos was having works featured at two other Leningrad theaters, and also writing music for most of the important Soviet films. A song he wrote for one film became a pop hit. Talk about these things, and the picture is rather different! Not the lonely artist pitted against Communist horrors, but a popular artist with much support in his society, and a regime struggling to control all this. Interesting to read secret police reports from the time about what artists and intellectuals were saying about Stalin’s artistic policies. There was wide dissent from them, and so Shos’s position — by now documented far beyond the Testimony book — can be seen as an almost inevitable one for an artist like him, shared with almost every other artist of any note.
Who are the people that we are attracting here?
Perhaps I am overly pessimistic, but the sad truth is that there is no evidence that the majority of Americans today have any interest in (or knowledge of) history at all. So appealing to a historical connection to create interest in what is already perceived as an elite product will never succeed.
At La Jolla SummerFest: The Passion of Dmitri Shostakovich
August 24th, 2015
by Barry Jagoda
SummerFest, La Jolla Music Society’s month of concerts, talks and coaching sessions more than amply rewards patrons. Now Music Director Cho-Liang (“Jimmy”) Lin has again outdone himself with a three-concert focus, August 21, 22 and 23, on the work of Dmitri Shostakovich, arguably the world’s greatest composer since Mozart and Beethoven.
In addition to bringing some of the globe’s most talented musicians to perform some quite lovely, and some very meaningful, poignant, concerts, Jimmy Lin also employed retired UC Berkley music scholar Richard Taruskin, (“He is our greatest interpreter of Shostakovich,” Lin told us) for a series of lectures dealing mainly with the composer’s music, but which also helped patrons through the cauldron of misunderstanding caused by World War II, the Cold War and Soviet politics.
For example, soon after being elected head of Russia’s national organization of composers, Shostakovich was forced to join the Communist Party, which he did quite reluctantly. This was followed not too long after by a heart attack, though the composer recovered to continue writing and producing, some of his most dramatic music. As a result, for those in the West more interested in politics than in music, Shostakovich has been seen as a figure of knuckling under to the Soviet regime or as a great composer (and a piano virtuoso) who refused to play to dictator Josef Stalin’s tune. All of this, and more, under pins the life and music of this great genius composer.
The always engaging, creatively insightful, program annotator Eric Bromberger can be depended on to help novice and experienced music lovers through the work of Music Society’s yearlong and summer programs. In the case of Shostakovich, reinforcement from Professor Taruskin was also most helpful. He delivered three lectures, as preludes to each of the concerts. He also presented an overview in an “Encounter” which engaged an audience that had come for a lectures on music but could not help but be transformed by a deep and fair-minded talk in explication and appreciation of Shostakovich.
For some who had failed to pay proper attention to music classes in college or who had given up their violin lessons by age 12, SummerFest provides a second chance. For those who know their musical culture, or for those who are novices, standing ovations were the rule in the concerts in the auditorium at the local Museum of Contemporary Arts late this summer.
Leading off the program at “Shostakovich III, August 23rd, was the Borromeo String Quartet, with Nicholas Kitchen in the first violin chair and Yeesun Kim, cellist, performing the String Quartet No. 12 in D-flat Major. These two are among the greatest musicians in the world today and, along with their superb string-playing partners, showed why. They demonstrated how Shostakovich teased with atonal, disharmonic music, much disapproved by Soviet cultural leaders because it was not music that could be understood by the ordinary citizen.
Many of us dislike this kind of 12-tone structure because we don’t understand it. But, according to Taruskin, Shostakovich used this atonal music as a brief tease and also as a way of expanding the reach of some his compositions. Shostakovich, himself, told an interviewer that “a composer can use this or that technique…as he sees fit.” In this Quartet, the atonal music makes a brief appearance thereby giving the composer wider latitude for what he wants to do as the piece progresses. Politically brilliant and musically sound!
A sonata for cello and piano was the second piece, played well by the Texas bred, Julliard graduate John Sharp, selected for the Chicago Symphony at age 27 and brilliantly by the famous pianist, Vladimir Feltsman.
Chicago Symphony Orchestra Principal Cellist John Sharp
No one can fail to be deeply moved by the Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, written in 1944 and the festival’s final tribute to Shostakovich. Twenty million Russians had died by then. “The Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941 was the greatest catastrophe ever to befall any nation, “ as Bromberger wrote.
The public Shostakovich reacted with his “Leningrad Symphony,” marches and songs filled with patriotism. But the Trio that closed out this magnificent SummerFest focus showed a different Shostakovich, deeply disturbed by the war. And, when the Nazi armies retreated, the atrocities committed against Russian Jews, obviously brought forward another deeply anguished side of the composer. One of the movements, of the Trio, was inspired by accounts that the Nazis had forced Jews to dance on their graves before execution. You could almost hear fair whispers of “Tevye the Milkman” before the music turned sinister and grotesque in a brilliant and beautiful sort of way. The Soviet government, at first, banned the performance of the Trio but the composer’s deep pain and grief had already been turned into an unforgettable work of passion proving again how music can feed our souls with very deep meaning.