The Art-Music, Literature and Linguistics Forum

Assorted items => YouTube performances => Topic started by: Gauk on February 14, 2015, 02:48:04 pm



Title: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: Gauk on February 14, 2015, 02:48:04 pm
This may be of interest.

http://youtu.be/4KjTYZF0CaY (http://youtu.be/4KjTYZF0CaY)


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: ahinton on February 14, 2015, 03:26:03 pm
This may be of interest.

http://youtu.be/4KjTYZF0CaY (http://youtu.be/4KjTYZF0CaY)
It certainly is of interest, although it has to be remembered that Shchedrin's implicit attempts at the rehabilitation of Khrennikov do emerge from someone who was just 15 years of age at the time when Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khatchaturian were officially denounced and he himself understandably admits that he was not a part of that scene at the time; the régime's treatment of Roslavets in particular before then and the fear in which Shostakovich, his protégé Weinberg and others lived from time to time both before and after that event are hardly without truth or substance. Yes, I've never believed that composers were routinely press-ganged by the authorities into writing movie music during those Soviet years - especially not hostakovich, whose international reputation (arguably greater than that of all of his colleagues except Prokofiev) was such as possibly to enable him to excuse himself from such duties had he so wished (which evidently he didn't, as he no doubt relished at least some of that work just as he did most other things on which he worked), but I find it hard, even from a distinguished Russian composer such as Shchedrin, to accept the almost whiter-than-white reputation with which he seeks to credit Khrennikov - it just seems to ring somewhat hollow to me. Above all, perhaps, such as I have heard of Khrennikov's work seems characterised by more blandness and ineffectuality than almost anything else, for all its occasional superficial attractions and the thought that someone of his calibre once held office in which he had the power to participate in the denunciation of a composer of the order of Shostakovich - surely one of the greatest Russian composers since Tchaikovsky - remains an uncomfortable one, despite Shchedrin's efforts at reputational restitution. Shchedrin might have done better instead to bang the drum for Weinberg, whose remarkable work is only recently beginning to attract due appreciation in the West.


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: tapiola on February 14, 2015, 07:49:31 pm
Shchedrin is re-writing history as is the norm these days.  It makes my disrespect for Shchedrin even greater.


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: Toby Esterhase on February 14, 2015, 11:11:26 pm
IMHO it should be better distinguish between political and aesthetics  judgments and place Khrennikov and Schedrinin in 1950's historical context.





Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: tapiola on February 15, 2015, 06:59:50 am
Why was my post so heavily edited?


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: ahinton on February 15, 2015, 12:26:17 pm
Why was my post so heavily edited?
I don't know; mine should have been, because there were quite a few mistakes in it (which I've now corrected)!


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: guest2 on February 15, 2015, 10:09:54 pm
. . . Shostakovich - surely one of the greatest Russian composers since Tchaikovsky . . .

There is no "surely" about it Mr. H. One of our greatest critics once wrote that "S is incapable of writing even a simple melody" and I agree with him - that is my own reaction to his meaningless note-spinning. Quite literally I have never been able to listen to any of his stuff for more than a minute before turning away/off in disgust. The high praise that comes to him from some quarters has for many years been a source of wonder to me. I can conclude only that those doing the praising

a) are insincere and have some unstated agenda; or

b) have little experience of real music; or

c) lack the musical sense altogether; or

d) possess some concept of the art of music incomprehensible to me.

He deserved all the denunciation he got!


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: Neil McGowan on February 15, 2015, 10:55:05 pm
Well-well!  This is certainly an edifying discussion, isn't it??

 ::)



Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: tapiola on February 16, 2015, 12:14:02 am
Gerard, there is simply no way to respond to a post like that. Surely it's a spoof right?


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: ahinton on February 16, 2015, 10:44:59 am
. . . Shostakovich - surely one of the greatest Russian composers since Tchaikovsky . . .

There is no "surely" about it Mr. H. One of our greatest critics once wrote that "S is incapable of writing even a simple melody"
Which one was that and when? Surely you could have named him or her? ANd on what grounds is/ws he/she one of "our" critics and what qualifies him/her as one of the "greatest"?

and I agree with him - that is my own reaction to his meaningless note-spinning. Quite literally I have never been able to listen to any of his stuff for more than a minute before turning away/off in disgust. The high praise that comes to him from some quarters has for many years been a source of wonder to me.
Well, that's your problem and no one else's; if you don't like his music - any of it - then so be it, I guess, but your reaction to it does not turn it into "meaningless note-spinning" - indeed, I don't ever recall hearing any of that from him.

I can conclude only that those doing the praising

a) are insincere and have some unstated agenda; or

b) have little experience of real music; or

c) lack the musical sense altogether; or

d) possess some concept of the art of music incomprehensible to me.
The fact that this is all that you conclude says more for your deductive powers than it does for Shostakovich, his music or its widespead acceptance. Why and on what perceived grounds you might assume a) is entirely unclear, the suggestion in b) and c) that the many so many musicians who have a deep admiration of and appreciation for Shostakovich "have little experience of real music" and "lack the musical sense altogether" beggars belief (whilst at the same time giving no clue as to what you think you mean by "real music" or "musical sense"), so we are left with d), in which, at last you do what Sorabji once accused the English music critic Martin Cooper of doing - you "lapse into sense".

He deserved all the denunciation he got!
In disagreeing wholeheartedly with you, I might ask you just how much denunciation (other than on occasion from certain powers that once were within the Soviet Union) he DID get!


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: ahinton on February 16, 2015, 10:46:36 am
Well-well!  This is certainly an edifying discussion, isn't it??

 ::)
Point taken - although just one unworthy and wholly gratuitous post doth not an unedifying discussion make!


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: ahinton on February 16, 2015, 10:47:18 am
Gerard, there is simply no way to respond to a post like that. Surely it's a spoof right?
If only it were...


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: guest2 on February 16, 2015, 12:41:50 pm
Which [great critic] was that and when? Surely you could have named him or her?

For the record, it was Gerald Abraham in Eight Soviet Composers (1943), page 28 and passim. It cannot be denied that a) he has a name, b) his judgement was reliable, and c) he knew his Russians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Abraham (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Abraham)

The whole book may be read here at the Internet Text Archive:
https://archive.org/details/eightsovietcompo007053mbp (https://archive.org/details/eightsovietcompo007053mbp)

What Abraham says on page 18 is especially enlightening and instructive: "A stranger hotch-potch of commonplace, bad taste and misdirected cleverness has never been called a symphony."

Then on page 28: "The slow movement . . . merely confirms one's suspicion that S. cannot write even a moderately good tune."

One ignores Abraham at one's peril!


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: ahinton on February 16, 2015, 01:37:55 pm
Which [great critic] was that and when? Surely you could have named him or her?

For the record, it was Gerald Abraham in Eight Soviet Composers (1943), page 28 and passim. It cannot be denied that a) he has a name, b) his judgement was reliable, and c) he knew his Russians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Abraham (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Abraham)

The whole book may be read here at the Internet Text Archive:
https://archive.org/details/eightsovietcompo007053mbp (https://archive.org/details/eightsovietcompo007053mbp)

What Abraham says on page 18 is especially enlightening and instructive: "A stranger hotch-potch of commonplace, bad taste and misdirected cleverness has never been called a symphony."

Then on page 28: "The slow movement . . . merely confirms one's suspicion that S. cannot write even a moderately good tune."

One ignores Abraham at one's peril!
Somehow I suspected that it was that person. I do not doubt a), he gave his own eloquent lie to b) and, whichever Russians he may have known, Shostakovich was not one of them.

I read a book of his called This Modern Stuff (or some such title) many years ago and was astonished at the author's prowess at compiling so many incongruities within a mercifully slim volume about which it might well be said that "a stranger hotch-potch of commonplace, bad taste and misdirected cleverness has never been called a" credible book on 20th century music. Note also its date of 1943. By that time, the author would have been able to hear only six of Shostakovich's symphonies (1, 2, 3, 5 , 6 & 7) and only the first of his 15 string quartets; I neither know nor care to which of those six symphonies he sought to refer in his barb (and have little inclination to look it up, since discovering which of them it was would hardly be edifying), but I know much less about Abraham's own symphonies or, in their presumed absence, on what he reckoned to base his purported symphonic judgement. I accept that the second and third symphonies (as with the twelfth) are not Shostakovich at his best, but Shostakovich at his arguably best of all is found in the fourth symphony which Abraham could not have known. Indeed, I find it hard to imagine what place the words "enlightening" and "instructive" could possibly have in any discussion of Abraham insofar as I know his work.

Your last sentence here is almost correct; it should read either "one reads Abraham at one's peril" (or at the peril of whomsoever or whatsoever might be close enough at the time to be vulnerable to having the book thrown at him/her/it in a fit of enraged irritation) or "one ignores Abraham if one has any sense". Fortunately, these days, he seems largely to be forgotten, which is hardly what anyone could ever say about Shostakovich.

Anyway, I think that we're all agreed that this thread is about Tikhon Khrennikov, not Shostakovich! - and I'm unaware that your Mr Abraham had anything to say about him in his book, after all..


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: Neil McGowan on February 16, 2015, 08:45:59 pm
surely one of the greatest Russian composers since Tchaikovsky

The irony being, of course, that Dmitry Dmitrievich lived to write 15 symphonies and 15 string quartets, after the naughty old USSR treated him free of charge. He was, it's true, pressured by another composer (Khrennikov) to withdraw and denounce LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK, and certain other works [astonishingly even the Socialist Realist comedy THE BRIGHT STREAM (SVETLIE RUCHEI)].  And he was chucked out of the Composer's Union, and wasn't allowed the Composer's Villa on the Black Sea.  He died of old age.

Meanwhile Pyotr Ilyich was abducted in broad daylight by Tsarist ultra-conservative loonies, who put him on trial in a kangaroo court made up of extremist Freemasons - and then locked in a room with a loaded pistol.  He had, it's true, been pressured by another composer (Balakirev) to withdraw his opera THE SECRET AGENT (OPRICHNIK) despite its whirlwind success - he then denounced the work in a newspaper article, and even asked the Jurgenson printing house to destroy the plates. Allegedly it was an 'anti-Russian' opera?  Exactly what would later be said about LADY MACBETH. 

But the difference was that Tchaikovsky was done in by lovely capitalist Imperialist nutters, whereas Shostakovich was banned from the composer's villa by saucy Stalinists   ;)


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: Neil McGowan on February 16, 2015, 08:47:16 pm
it was Gerald Abraham


Gerald who?


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: Neil McGowan on February 16, 2015, 09:05:18 pm
surely one of the greatest Russian composers since Tchaikovsky

Hmmm, I saw what you did there  ;)

Quite a few rather important composers have slipped through the cracks there, haven't they?

Both Taneyevs (although primarily Sergey), Rimsky-Korsakov, Gliere, Glazunov, Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Medtner, Prokofiev, and a chap called Stravinsky?  Not to mention a host of piano-soloist-composers, and other composers from the non-Russian parts of the USSR, and even further afield.

I think there are strong grounds for naming Prokofiev as another worthy carrier of Tchaikovsky's mantle?  He lovingly pastiches his beloved master in so many of his works, WAR & PEACE not being the least of them (which opens with a clear homage to THE QUEEN OF SPADES)

Of course in our house we are unrepentant evangelists and activists for both
Shostakovich (http://youtu.be/Lh6iAImzyRc) and
Prokofiev (http://youtu.be/umYf4QJsRO8)




Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: ahinton on February 17, 2015, 07:42:20 am
surely one of the greatest Russian composers since Tchaikovsky

The irony being, of course, that Dmitry Dmitrievich lived to write 15 symphonies and 15 string quartets, after the naughty old USSR treated him free of charge. He was, it's true, pressured by another composer (Khrennikov) to withdraw and denounce LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK, and certain other works [astonishingly even the Socialist Realist comedy THE BRIGHT STREAM (SVETLIE RUCHEI)].  And he was chucked out of the Composer's Union, and wasn't allowed the Composer's Villa on the Black Sea.  He died of old age.

Meanwhile Pyotr Ilyich was abducted in broad daylight by Tsarist ultra-conservative loonies, who put him on trial in a kangaroo court made up of extremist Freemasons - and then locked in a room with a loaded pistol.  He had, it's true, been pressured by another composer (Balakirev) to withdraw his opera THE SECRET AGENT (OPRICHNIK) despite its whirlwind success - he then denounced the work in a newspaper article, and even asked the Jurgenson printing house to destroy the plates. Allegedly it was an 'anti-Russian' opera?  Exactly what would later be said about LADY MACBETH. 

But the difference was that Tchaikovsky was done in by lovely capitalist Imperialist nutters, whereas Shostakovich was banned from the composer's villa by saucy Stalinists   ;)
???


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: ahinton on February 17, 2015, 07:43:10 am
Quite. I realise, as no doubt you also do, that Gerard provided a Wiki link, but the question remains...


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: ahinton on February 17, 2015, 07:54:50 am
surely one of the greatest Russian composers since Tchaikovsky

Hmmm, I saw what you did there  ;)

Quite a few rather important composers have slipped through the cracks there, haven't they?

Both Taneyevs (although primarily Sergey), Rimsky-Korsakov, Gliere, Glazunov, Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Medtner, Prokofiev, and a chap called Stravinsky?  Not to mention a host of piano-soloist-composers, and other composers from the non-Russian parts of the USSR, and even further afield.

I think there are strong grounds for naming Prokofiev as another worthy carrier of Tchaikovsky's mantle?  He lovingly pastiches his beloved master in so many of his works, WAR & PEACE not being the least of them (which opens with a clear homage to THE QUEEN OF SPADES)
Ah, well - as long as you saw what I did there(!). No, none of those composers has slipped through any cracks, of course (and, speaking of cracks, perhaps the joke backfired somewhat, but at least the statement got a reaction!) - and even then, I did write "one of"(!) and it hardly needs saying that Tikhon Tikhov falls far short of meriting includion therewith. There's Gretchaninov, Roslavets, Weinberg and others too..

The serious point behind that statement was, of course, that Shostakovich is one of the 20th century Russian luminaries (even the egregious Abraham mentions "common consent" and is not without his compliments about Shostakovich - yes, I made myself trawl through as much as I could stand of his essay on the composer) - but that, among British music critics, Abraham is (deservedly) hardly remembered today, even in his own country. What Abraham he forgot (or more likely didn't know) is that Shostakovich's first symphony was not just a conservatoire student piece; he began working on it a good 2½ years before he completed it.

That said, I see little point in dignifying his ill-considered statements about Shostakovich with further discussion of his essay, except to mention en passant that even he seems to have a considerably more positive view of the composer than does Gerard.


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: Neil McGowan on February 17, 2015, 08:59:24 am
???

In the light of what might be called COMPOSERS VARIOUSLY SLATED above...

... it seemed worth pointing out that back in the Imperial Russian days of yore, composers such as Tchaikovsky (who, just like Shostakovich, didn't hesitate at putting his ability at the service of the State) didn't just get their wrists slapped...



Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: Neil McGowan on February 17, 2015, 09:08:00 am
There's Gretchaninov, Roslavets, Weinberg and others too..

Weinberg was born in Poland.  We don't talk of Rachmaninov 'the American composer", do we?   ;)   

Unfortunately this discussion has slumped downhill so rapidly that it really doesn't deserve further attention - so I am out of this topic now.



Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: ahinton on February 17, 2015, 01:27:14 pm
???

In the light of what might be called COMPOSERS VARIOUSLY SLATED above...

... it seemed worth pointing out that back in the Imperial Russian days of yore, composers such as Tchaikovsky (who, just like Shostakovich, didn't hesitate at putting his ability at the service of the State) didn't just get their wrists slapped...
That's not for me to answer.

Anyway, it was not with anything of the kind in mind that I wrote as I did in my first response here, my motivation on the contrary being that Shchedrin's attempts to rehabilitate a composer who was once in an official position of power and who even at the age of around 90 continued to defend what have been widely described as some of the less favourable of his actions vis-à-vis certain of his compatriots ring rather hollow if for no better reason than that TK was a minor figure among 20th century Russian composers and the entire exercise risks descending into special pleading.


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: ahinton on February 17, 2015, 01:43:10 pm
There's Gretchaninov, Roslavets, Weinberg and others too..
Weinberg was born in Poland.  We don't talk of Rachmaninov 'the American composer", do we?   ;)
Er, no, "we" don't (and please, not that "we" again!) - not least, perhaps, because Rachmaninov was born in Russia. Yes, Weinberg was born in Poland but lived in Russia for almost the last six decades of his life and, for that matter, Szymanowski was born in what is now part of Ukraine but we don't think of him as Ukrainian. That said, of the origins of Grechaninov and Roslavets thee would appar to be little doubt.

Unfortunately this discussion has slumped downhill so rapidly that it really doesn't deserve further attention - so I am out of this topic now.
I suspect that this may in large part be due to the fact the it has wandered off topic very rapidly, which is indeed unfortunate. That said, had it not done so, one might reasonably have anticipated reading posts about Shchedrin and Khrennikov and their works and, inevitably and necessarily, some commentary on the former's defensive statements about the latter and his conduct as shown in the video . . .


Title: Re: Rodion Shchedrin talking about Tikhon Khrennikov
Post by: Jolly Roger on March 12, 2015, 08:54:09 am
Shchedrin is re-writing history as is the norm these days.  It makes my disrespect for Shchedrin even greater.

Makes one wonder who is really rewriting history and who has been manufacturing it to fit their agenda.
I have a similar disdain for Henze's misguided mindset, but I do respect his musical contributions..hmm..maybe that should change..