Prof. Ruth HaCohen-Pinczower, co-author of Singing Freedom: The Interplay between Music and Politics in the West, discusses the power of music as well as power and music.
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This season is made possible by The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, which promotes humanistic, democratic, and liberal values in the social discourse in Israel.
Shostakovich’s string quartets have were largely embedded in private, home play. The score was circulated, quartets would form to play for a home audience, maybe just the players themselves. Here, Shostakovich put his despair and anguish. These performances were in a way private dissent over Soviet musicology. The Emerson String Quartet, which is greatly lauded as textually exact, I think fails these quartets for not importing the anguish they were meant to show. Listening to Emerson, I feel like I have the score before me (I can’t read music, so this is a metaphor at best) still waiting to be played.
His 4th Symphony, while suppressed long, was parasitized for some of his other symphonies, primarily the 5th. Motifs are borrowed direct. Some of his war motifs also come from the 4th. But, in the 4th, they are more like Prokofiev displays, placed not so much for an integrated emotional line, but for their brilliance.
I found, in my 20s and 30s Shostakovich integral to me; I’m not sure that ended up being a plus.