| | I took a rattling bus (line 60 from Newport to Monmouth) to my Shostakovich class last Wednesday morning a little before dawn. This week the class was temporarily held in the hamlet of Llandenny and Terence Gilmore-James (Terry!) sent me a carefully hand-drawn map to the town centre. (About the word Llandenny: in Welsh "ll" is pronounced by blowing air
out of both sides of your mouth, like a lisping cartoon snake, say. I find
myself making excuses to practice the Ll sound, e.g. ordering whatever beer's got it. But words with two Ll sounds, like the common name Llewellyn,
are currently out of my league.)
I got off the bus at Cold Harbour with my cup of coffee and baguette and walked the rest of the way, about two miles on a country road. The sun was coming up and the scene became handsome:
 
The rest of the class is from nearby and they were impressed that I'd come up from Cardiff. A gentleman named Max who plays the double bass thinks I am "quite enterprising". Terence and his wife Grace drove me all the way back to the train station in Newport, and promised to do so for the remaining eight class sessions. Both are one of a kind, and everyone in the class has been warm and charming toward me. We were filling out a form and someone complained of having no box to check for "indeterminate gender", and everyone tittered and then the same person murmured "quite ludicrous!" under her breath. I forgot to mention that the class is mostly made up of upper middle aged sorts and pensioners. I am, it seems, the only whipper-snapper.
The professor, Terence, is just that sort of intuitive, charismatic personality that you dream of having for a classical music prof. No one in the class seems to *really* like Shostakovich, in an unqualified way, and Terence's opinion is that his music would have been better if he had sneaked away to the west like Rachmaninov and Stravinsky did. But everyone respects the symphonies and listens hard and places him somewhere between Chaikovksy (in string orchestration), Prokofiev (in the shape of his melodic lines) and Hindemith (not positive what the connection here is, but I think it's also melodic). His symphonies 1 & 5 seem to be the favorites so far.
I think being under the giant eyeball of Stalin might have actually been good for Shostakovich's music (if not his health). I'm building my case. It's like the way 80's hard core thrived under Reagan and Thatcher. When W was re-elected, we consoled ourselves the at least we should expect four years of really good punk rock (by the way, where is this 2004-2008 really good punk rock?) Shostakovich's music always dealt in the absurd and contradictory, it seems appropriate that he composed in an environment where there was irony aplenty (e.g. the irony of Shostakovich composing From Jewish Folk Poetry to please Stalin's request to use more folk music, only to be unable to premiere them because Stalin had begun campaigning against Jewish culture in the press) Actually I don't know if this is the right approach. I'm working on it.
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| | Posted 1/20/2008 3:10 PM - 99 Views - 6 eProps - 4 comments
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