Chicago Symphony Orchestra
But Shostakovich too swayed with that wind. Denounced in 1936 for the repulsive characters, depraved story line, and degenerate scoring (which was utterly appropriate given the characters and story) of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Shostakovich kept his mouth shut and pulled back artistically. Accused in 1948, along with several other composers, of celebrating a “cult of atonality, dissonance, and discord,” and displaying “formalistic perversions and antidemocratic tendencies,” he obediently confessed: “I…deviated in the direction of formalism and began to speak a language incomprehensible to the people….I know that the party is right….I am deeply grateful for the criticism contained in the resolution.”
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At times he seems to have had a sort of artistic schizophrenia–one moment musically tweaking the apparatchiks, the next offering them patriotic works like “Vow of the People’s Commissar.” The banal, facile, and politically safe constantly shove up against the genuine and deeply felt. Even after the death of Stalin and the slight loosening of the strictures under which artists worked during his regime Shostakovich frequently took the careful road. Despite all he suffered at the hands of the Union of Soviet Composers, he served for many years as an officer of the group. For most of his career he enjoyed the benefits of being one of the favored members of the Soviet elite, with a far better standard of living than was available to the vast majority of his compatriots, though that didn’t prevent his son, conductor Maxim Shostakovich, from defecting to the West.
In the first poem, “Babi Yar,” Yevtushenko dealt with the Russian tendency toward anti-Semitism, though in writing “Oh my Russian people, I know that at heart you are internationalists, but there have been those with soiled hands who abused your good name” he may have been overly generous and optimistic. In the second poem, “Humor,” he wrote about the difficulties tyrants of any sort have with laughter.
The other great strength of this recording is the men of the Chicago Symphony Chorus. In most recordings of this work one must choose between a full-throated Russian choral sound and musical precision: Russian choruses seldom can offer the exactitude demanded by Shostakovich’s music, while American ensembles have a tendency to sound like really good college glee clubs. Duain Wolfe’s chorus offers us the best of both worlds.
