John Dalmas asks:

>Once again, Shostakovich's "Leningrad" Symphony (No.7) takes a beating in
>the press.  Arguably the most maligned symphony of the century now passing,
>the "Leningrad" is picked apart anew in the New York Times (Feb.22) in a
>review of a Brooklyn Philharmonic performance under Robaret Spano. All the
>same adjectives we have heard since the work's premiere in this country in
>1942 are trotted out again: bland, dull, boring, embarrassing.  Surely the
>same might be said of a few other works of the last hundred years to which
>instead we continue to pay reverent lip service (the Sibelius Fourth comes
>to mind).  Why is the "Leningrad" such fair game? Any comments?

Hmmmm - I've had just the opposite impression: that critics now are
praising it to high heaven based on a revisionist view that Shostakovich
wasn't really a propagandist for the Party: he was a secret resistance
fighter.  In some bizarre way, we are now supposed to believe that all of
Shostakovich's "bad" music - the banal, trite, Soviet-glorifying stuff -
this was really "good" music, where he secretly thumbs his nose at Stalin
and the Soviet system.  Maybe one's impression of the Seventh, and much
other Shostakovich at that, depends on how much of "Testimony" and that
flavor of biography you are willing to believe.  The Seventh is burdened
with the obvious, blatant propaganda surrounding it's composition, the
disgusting grasping of it's American premeire (a battle of egos between
Stokowski and Toscanini worthy of a "Hillary and Jackie"-style film), and
the subsequent overexposure on a scale to rival that of the "Titanic"
soundtrack.  Add to that the "Bolero"-like musical endurance test of the
ostinato "invasion" of the first movement, and unless you have a really
special interpretation, you WILL end up with the musical equivalent of a
Fourth of July at Heritage USA - just too goddam much.  I'm sure there are
some recordings out there that rectify some of the inherent problems this
work will always have, but life's too short - it really isn't *that* good.

That said, I can't wait for someone to agree that the Shostakovich
7th is *much* better than the Sibelius 4th.

Mark
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