Claudio Abbado has conducted his last perfromance with the Berlin

Philharmonic at its home venue.  He is now taking the orchestra on a brief
tour be fore retiring as it pricipal conductor and artistic director.  His
last performance in Berlin featured some offbeat Shostakovich film music.
Here is the section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine that reported on this
April 29:

   "...His friendship with Nono brought him into contact with the
   Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, who directed his London
   production of "Boris Godunov." It was then that the conductor came
   across Shostakovich as a composer of film music, believing the most
   expressive of all his works to be the very last piece he wrote --
   namely the film music for Grigori Kosinzew's movie adaptation of
   "King Lear."

   "Abbado's farewell concert therefore included an extraordinary double
   revelation of both film and music.  It was also a glimpse into the
   murky depths of history, shot through with the interminable, grinding
   death marches that since Mahler and Alban Berg have become a topos
   of 20th century music especially in Shostakovich's world.  While
   Verdi was constantly dreaming of an operatic version of "King Lear,"
   it was not until Aribert Reimann that such a work was actually written.
   Shostakovich, meanwhile, was commissioned not with an opera, but
   rather with the incidental music to Kosinzew's 1941 Leningrad production
   of the play.  Even then, he is alleged to have said that "it is not
   for the composer to be a musical illustrator" -- a principal he
   followed in 1971 with his music for Kosinzew's epic black-and-white
   movie.  That the music preserves its parasymphonic autonomy is also
   what makes it so sublime: Not only did one see one of the most
   momentous works in the history of Russian cinema, but one heard
   authentic Shostakovich, too.

   "To have shown Kosinzew's 140-minute film in its entirety would
   not have worked, especially as the musical underpinning is only
   intermittent.  Instead, Abbado and Klaus-Peter Gross selected an
   important sequence that would also enable the audience to hear the
   beauty of Boris Pasternak's Russian rendering of Shakespeare's
   original.  The sound was then turned down and the tonal urgency of
   Shostakovich's score was heard emanating from the darkness.  Abbado
   and Gross even raided the 1941 score, extracting from it the two
   Cordelia songs and eight Fool's songs -- an important decision in
   terms of the dramaturgy, given that Kosinzew treats Lear and the Fool
   as an ego-alter-ego duo and does not deny Lear certain comical traits
   in his madness.  "The projection of the film sequences onto several
   screens installed throughout the auditorium and the vocal parts sung
   by Elena Zhidkova and Anatoli Kotscherga combined with the orchestra
   and choir to produce a suggestive equivalent of the Soviet montage
   aesthetic.  Kosinzew's film with its at times archaic expressionism
   and "kinetic" movements may be weighed down by ideology and its
   insistence that the king's undoing is his betrayal of the ordinary
   folk, but as a parable of despair, it remains a thrilling experience
   right to the end, when the interminable death marches march on into
   a bleak and empty no-man's land.  And one must agree completely with
   Abbado that Shostakovich's forceful, often dissonantly grating music
   with its ostinati, its obsessive repetitions, screeching fanfares
   and devastatingly apocalyptic marches is indeed among the greatest
   things he ever wrote, especially as even its more heavy-handed moments
   are instantly atomized by the negating power of the visual.  "Below
   the screens, the orchestra and choir performed in almost complete
   darkness.  Only at the very end did the lights go on again, just as
   they would have in a movie theater.  Abbado's glorious era could
   hardly have had a less glamorous end."

Denis Fodor