David Dalle
Thursday February 23rd, 2017 with David Dalle
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Communist: Shostakovich's 2nd and 3rd symphonies

Today we continue the Shostakovich symphonic cycle with two of his early symphonies, the 2nd and 3rd from 1927 and 1929. These works were semi-official commisions and were intended as overtly prograganda pieces for the young USSR. Shostakovich was a young man and enjoying the rather prosaic life of a young, gifted composer in Leningrad. In the late 20’s the hammer (and sickle) had yet to fall on the Soviet artistic world and Shostakovich. Concerts of new European music were still being organized by the Association of Contemporary Music, Soviet composers were still able to experiment quite a bit, and we see this in Shostakovich’s 2nd symphony in particular. Both the 2nd and 3rd symphonies were fairly short works with choral finales, the 2nd praising Lenin and the 1927 October revolution, the 3rd praising May Day. Shostakovich had enormous difficulty composing the choral finales, as he found the texts turgid and uninspiring, and it is the instrumental sections which are most interesting. In the 2nd the orchestra portrays order arising from chaos heard in dense, polyphonic clusters. The opening of the 2nd is a young avant-garde Shostakovich and it is wonderful! You can listen to the first installment of my Shostakovich cycle here: http://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/105/30605.html