Shostakovitch’s Symphony No 7
The Maryinsky Orchestra from St Petersburg was in Tskhinvali yesterday, with conductor Valery Gergiev, an Ossetian, and performed the Lenningrad, followed by Tchaikovsky’s Symphony Pathétique where 70% of the structures were destroyed or significantly damaged, gas, electricity and water were cut off fourteen days ago. I'm looking for picture of Tskhinvali after the war, and they're pretty hard to find.
Revised numbers: The South Ossetian numbers are 1,450 killed. Russian prosecutors announced that the bodies of 133 civilians had been found in South Ossetia, but they haven't done all the makeshift mass graves. Georgia's numbers are 215. The number of refugees is around 35,000.
Scanning through the US media coverage -- LATimes "Russian pomp and dominance", WAPO "An Orchestrated Russian Tour", Minneapolis Star Trib "Concert in Ossetia a PR masterpiece" ... it looks as if the headline copy is patriotically coordinated. I'm not up to reading variations of the same color copy wrapping the mandatory regime message.
Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven’s 9th at the Berlin Wall. Simon Rattle conducted the 9th at Mauthausen concentration camp, when neo-Nazi's entered the Austrian government. Daniel Barenboim conducted in Ramallah, and with Edward Said, founded a Palestinian-Israeli orchestra. Mstislav Rostropovich rushed to Moscow in 1991 to join Boris Yeltsin in the besieged White House during the August Coup. Except for Barenboim/Said in the Occupied West Bank, they all got better press.
Gergiev was, up until yesterday, principal guest conductor of New York's Metropolitan Opera. His contract with the Met may not contain a "meaningful free speech" protection clause, so that may be sudden history. He's been conducting Sergi Prokofiev, Dimitri Shostakovich, Gustav Mahler, and living composers Henri Dutilleux, Thomas Ades and Rodion Shchedrin. I don't share his love for Prokofiev (I hear recycled work from the Classical to Kiji, though I love his Romeo and Julliet, which I was fortunate enough to have heard during the first American production of the ballet by the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago and the San Francisco Orchestra), but I appreciate Shostakovich, Mahler, and anyone who gives living composers of orchestral music a passing thought.
