Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony, his least conventional, is essentially a song cycle for soprano, bass, and chamber orchestra using texts by a variety of poets on the theme of death. It is in 11 movements, some as brief as a minute, and some as long as 10 minutes. Shostakovich reports that he wrote it under the influence of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, and he completed it in a burst of inspiration in about six weeks in 1969. Given its theme, it's not surprising that it's among the composer's darkest works, one ...
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Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony, his least conventional, is essentially a song cycle for soprano, bass, and chamber orchestra using texts by a variety of poets on the theme of death. It is in 11 movements, some as brief as a minute, and some as long as 10 minutes. Shostakovich reports that he wrote it under the influence of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, and he completed it in a burst of inspiration in about six weeks in 1969. Given its theme, it's not surprising that it's among the composer's darkest works, one that examines grief, suffering, and mortality from various grim perspectives. Shostakovich finds numerous innovative and inventive ways to evoke the bleakness of his subject, from the spare, dry hocketing of pizzicato strings and woodblock in the seventh movement, to the ironic use of the malagueña in the second, to the abrupt finality of the eleventh. Roman Kofman leads the strings and percussion of the Beethoven Orchester Bonn in a reading that does full justice to the gravity of...
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