Name: Poème Héroïque
Start: 2016-11-20T00:00:00.000Z
End: 2016-11-20T00:00:00.000Z
Location: Auckland Town Hall

Organization

Admin

Aorangi Symphony Orchestra

Conductor

Sarah Bisley

Orchestra

Instrumentalist

Philip Smith

Organ

Joella Pinto

Violin

Poème Héroïque

Auckland

New Zealand

Auckland Town Hall

Public

Concert

Poéme héroïque, op. 33

Le Tombeau de Couperin

The Lark Ascending

Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, op. 47

Alejandro Alberto Giess Sarmiento

Approved

Conducted by Sarah Bisley, recorded live by Franco Viganoni on November 20th 2016 in the Auckland Town Hall, New Zealand.

Notes on the work:
Shostakovich was old enough – at the age of 11 – to compose a funeral march for the victims of the February revolution that overthrew the Tsar in 1917 as a result of the crisis the world war had brought to Russia.  In the second world war, he was famously to compose his seventh symphony to mark the heroic resistance to the Germans of his home city, then called Leningrad.
The fifth symphony belongs to the period of Stalinist Terror that preceded the war. In some sense the criticism of Shostakovich’s opera The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk that erupted after Stalin, Molotov and others went to see it at the Bolshoi on 26 January 1936 marked the opening of that terrifying phase. Pravda published an article ‘Muddle Instead of Music’, denouncing ‘formalism’, the code word for the opposite of ‘socialist realism’. Shostakovich was rightly alarmed. He finished his fourth symphony, but its premiere, scheduled for 11 December, did not take place. ‘Fear was all around.’ 

The composer asked to speak to Stalin in person, but the phone did not ring. He asked Marshal Tukhachevsky to write a letter on his behalf, though the military hero was himself to be arrested, tortured and executed in 1937. Shostakovich survived, but his music was not performed. 

Putting the fourth symphony in a drawer – it was not performed till 1961 – Shostakovich started on the fifth in April 1937 at a resort in the Crimea. The short score was completed in Leningrad on 20 July. He played the work to his colleagues in October, and chose Yevgeny Mravinsky to conduct it. It was premiered in the Philharmonia Hall on 21 November. 
The symphony was in classic four-movement form and moved from tragic opening to apparently triumphant finale. The first movement, a vast span, enormously varied, ends with an inconclusive phrase on the celesta. A grotesque, rather Mahler-ish, scherzo follows.  The slow movement – drafted in three days – was at the heart of the work and seems like some kind of requiem, ending with a form of Amen. The finale, which appears to renew a sense of hope and survival, may not be quite what it appears. In the quiet section the composer quotes from his recent setting of Pushkin’s ‘Regeneration’: 
‘An artist-barbarian with a drowsy brush
Blackens over the painting of a genius 
And senselessly draws on top of it 
His own illegitimate designs.
But over the years the foreign paint 
Flakes away like old scales… 
Thus do delusions vanish 
From my worried soul 
And in their place visions arise
Of pure, original days.’
According to Simon Volkov Shostakovich himself insisted that the finale was not exultant.  ‘The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov.’
The applause for the work was tremendous. Shostakovich’s friends realised that such applause might be taken as a provocation. The chairman of the Leningrad Union of Composers indeed said that the symphony did ‘not bode well for the future of Soviet symphonic music’. But it survived, and so did its composer, endorsing the remark that it was ‘the practical creative answer of a Soviet artist to just criticism’.
That endorsement itself may be ironic. Life under such a regime had to be full of irony, spoken or unspoken. ‘He could not disregard the inner deception of our existence’, Bobrovsky wrote of Shostakovich; ‘the pain he experienced for us all, for our spiritual impurity, for the daily desecration of the truth, this was what summoned his muse to life.’                             Nicholas Tarling

Shostakovich "Symphony No.5 in D Minor" Op 47 (1937)

Poème Héroïque by Dupré, Ravel, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich, De (2016/2016), Director musical Sarah Bisley, Auckland Town Hall, Auckland, New Zealand

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