Classical Newb

I wanted to listen to some new baroque music away from the big names, so I went to wikipedia and looked at the names. I semi-randomly picked this composer, and this is the most popular piece from him in Spotify. It is Passacaglia XVI in G Minor for solo violin.

Shostakovich, symphony No. 4. op. 43.  This piece was written through a Stalinist purge after Pravda, by orders of Stalin, publicly condemned Shostakovich in the mid 30s. He kept working on it, he finished it, he rehearsed it, and then, at the last minute, he decided not to play it. It wasn't played until 1961.

This was part of the record that had the Trio No. 2. It sounds very interesting to me. It is supposed to be a pieced based on a Klezmer piece. It doesn't sound like Klezmer at all unless you pay a lot of attention.  

This is great movement from Trio No. 2, Op. 67 from Shostakovich.

Shostakovich Piano Trio No. 2, Op. 67. This song was dedicated to the memory of Ivan Sollertinsky, his polymath best friend.

This is a great blog entry on the personality of Ivan Sollertinsky, best friend of Shostakovich. Read it and learn how Sollertinsky, who would lecture on music before a concert, once pretended to be a goose and flew out of the stage to humiliate a rude member of the audience.

Best friend of Shostakovich. The article is brief. I wondered if he was killed during a political purge. The English articles doesn't say anything, but the French one says that he died of a heart attack.

Like number 2, No. 3 also have some kind of patriotic theme. While it was the October revolution for 2, for 3 it is May 1. It is hard to interpret the piece. As the wikipedia entry says, while Shostakovich said that it was about peace and reconciliation, the music sounds dark and sardonic.

And interesting read in one of the pieces that Shostakovich didn't feel too good about.

Here is a part of Rachmaninoff's second Symphony, as someone kindly corrected it. :)

Unfortunately, he lived in Soviet Russia, right after the Russian Civil Wars. So his lack of interest in the subject could have been problematic.

Shostakovich was a prodigy. As a child, he would play by memory a piece he would once or twice instead of reading the music. His first symphony, from which his piece is the second movement, was composed when he was 19-years-old, as a graduation exercise.