2013-02-28
4 分钟Howard Goodall and Suzy Klein discuss Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony
The story of music in 50 pieces with Howard Goodall and Susie Klein.
Your next choice, Howard, is a piece of music which is inextricably linked with the history of the 20th century.
It's Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony.
Why have you chosen it on purely musical grounds?
If you did a poll of musicians and composers, they'd probably say that of that period, the greatest Shostakovich symphony as a piece of music is his fifth symphony.
But his fifth symphony belongs in a tradition that goes back to marla.
It's actually rather malyrian.
In fact, there's a tradition that maybe Sibelius fitted into.
In other words, it's part of an ongoing tradition of symphonic work.
So I couldn't choose that because it's not different enough, even though it's a great piece of music.
The Leningrad Symphony addresses an issue that I felt when I was researching and writing all this history of music was a very key one for the 20th century, which is, what do you do in classical music in a popular age?
What's your relationship with the populace?
Because there's no doubt the 20th century became about mass market, mass audiences through broadcasting and records, and that for many classical musicians, they struggled with that relationship.
So I wanted to look for ways in which we could find how classical music interfaced with the general audience.
There aren't many better examples than Shostakiewicz Leningrad Symphony.
And what you've got to ask yourself is, why was classical music struggling with the mass market?
I found it was very revealing because in the period of modernism, that is, the first 40 years of the 20th century, music sort of became about itself.
It had an internal argument, lots of.
Composers arguing about these very cerebral ideas.
What music should be quite what's a discord, what's the scale, all these kind of things.