Rozhdestvensky and Shostakovich. Award for courage and perpetuation of the memory of an idol

GORISH. The Saxon State Chapel awarded the International Day of Shostakovich in Horish Prize to conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky.

The festival dedicated to Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich is held in Saxon Gorisch for a reason. Here, in 1960, the String Quartet No. 8 was written, dedicated to the memory of the victims of fascism.

Rozhdestvensky’s conducting career began with Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. But the scope of his interests was not limited to traditional classics: Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Dvorak. Thanks to him, fans of classics in the USSR were able to get acquainted with the works of German expressionist composers Orff and Hindemith, Frenchman Pulenk, Swede Stenhammar, innovative works by Alfred Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Denisov, Kancheli. Dmitry Shostakovich remains one of the most beloved composers throughout his 65-year career. His music sounded and recorded on records performed by many Russian and foreign orchestras, led by Rozhdestvensky in different years. This happened even at a time when not so much time passed after the company unleashed by Zhdanov against the “formalist” and the “reptile before the West” decadent Shostakovich. The most important stage in his creative biography was the work with Boris Pokrovsky on the opera Nose at the Chamber Theater in 1974. In the process of preparation, all participants had to face a powerful opposition of officials from culture.

Under the direction of Gennady Rozhdestvensky, the State Academic Capella performed the first version of the Ninth Symphony, which was considered lost, at the festival in memory of the composer. On the same evening, a suite from the play “Conditionally killed” was also heard, whose clavier was found by the conductor in the archive of the Glinka Museum. The production of the Leningrad Music Hall in 1931 with the scenery by Nikolai Akimov was attended by Claudia Shulzhenko, Leonid Utyosov and the artists of his Theajaz.

Rozhdestvensky in an interview called Shostakovich and Britten his idols, which he worships for many years. A personal acquaintance of the two conductor and composer took place on the eve of the Edinburgh Festival, at which the Fourth Symphony of Dmitry Dmitrievich was to be performed. It was in the early 60s, when the composer was greeted with a standing ovation in the West, and in the USSR he was still under an unwritten ban.

Elena Tanakova © Gallerix.ru