Overture Magazine - 2018-19 Season FINAL_BSO_Overture_May_June | Page 20

BRAHMS VIOLIN CONCERTO SING TO YOUR AUDIENCE. WITH OVERTURE OVERTURE. Reach over 150,000 patrons of the BSO five times a year in Overture, a program that’s about more than just beautiful music. RESERVE YOUR AD SPACE TODAY! TO ADVERTISE, CONTACT: Ken Iglehart [email protected] Lynn Talbert [email protected] Call 443.873.3916 Now also distributed at Strathmore Music Center in Bethesda 18 OV E R T U R E / BSOmusic.org by a Russian orthodox priest and carrying icons and a respectful petition to the Tsar, converged on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to beg for improvements in their hard lives. Despite their intimidating numbers, they were a peaceful assembly singing hymns and Russian patriotic songs. Tsar Nicholas II was not at the palace to receive their petition. The Tsar’s soldiers, perhaps reacting in panic, fired repeatedly on the crowd, killing 130 people, by conservative estimates, but some said upwards of one thousand. “Bloody Sunday,” as it became known, sparked a series of protests and strikes across Russia against the corrupt and oppressive regime and went down in history as the prelude to the Russian Revolution of 1917. As the U.S.S.R. celebrated the Revolution’s 40 th anniversary in 1957, Dmitri Shostakovich turned to that fateful day as the basis of his Eleventh Symphony. Premiered on October 30, 1957 in Moscow, it pleased the Soviet authorities and won Shostakovich the Lenin Prize the following year. But it also kicked off a controversy in musical circles both inside the Soviet Union and internationally. Many accused Shostakovich of playing politics rather than being true to his artistic conscience, of writing a swollen example of “Socialist Realism” to improve his standing with the regime. They suggested the Eleventh was program music depicting historical events and not a real symphony at all. However, the Eleventh is a much greater work than its detractors claimed and, though programmatic in its first two movements, is indeed a symphony in its construction. Its most unusual feature is that its thematic material is primarily composed of quotations from prison and revolutionary songs of the 1905 era, woven together and developed according to symphonic principles. Played without pause, the symphony’s four massive movements are linked by recurring motives and reprises of the song melodies. Perhaps Shostakovich also intended this work to have a more universal and timeless message beyond the commemoration of this particular historical moment. Many Russian listeners — even the composer’s son, Maxim—believed the Eleventh also referred to the bloody Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution one year earlier in 1956. In any case, this symphony can be heard as a musical response to mindless violence and the oppression of the innocent in any time and place. Shostakovich called the first movement, “The Palace Square.” It opens with very soft music of widely spaced chords for strings and two harps evoking the cold and bleakness of that long-ago winter morning; this music will return throughout the work. We also hear two other important elements: a rumbling motive in the timpani and a distant military call on muted trumpets — both of which oscillate uneasily between the major and minor modes. Eventually, a pair of flutes sing the first of the revolutionary songs: “Listen” (“Like a treasonous deed, like a tyrant’s conscience, the autumn night is black …”); snare drum and muted trumpets build it aggressively. After this dies down, low strings intone a grim ascending melody: “The Prisoner.” The movement’s closing moments mix all these thematic elements as the music hovers expectantly. Movement two, “The 9 th of January,” describes the events of that day with shocking power. Rushing low strings depict the crowd converging on the square before the Winter Palace. Clarinets and bassoons sing another revolutionary song: “Oh Tsar, our little father” (“look around you; life is impossible because of the Tsar’s servants, against whom we are helpless”). This theme grows louder and more urgent until the whole orchestra shouts it out. Then we hear the stark melody of “Bare your heads” with its many repeated notes rising upward in the brass. A quiet development of “Oh Tsar” follows as the crowd waits patiently. After another forceful climax, the timpani motive and the bleak string