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Praise for Reviews

Regarding "Vocal Ravishment", the Sept. 19 review of Nuccia Focile: I look for Heuwell Tircuit's reviews. They are always to the point and not overdone. He [is] very exact. Good job as always. Hope to read more; they are lots of fun!

— Richard Evenson

Views of Shostakovich, Then and Now

Regarding "Shostakovich at His Centenary, Part I", Sept. 19: I’m a Bay Area native, cellist, and former faculty member at San Francisco Conservatory of Music and UC Berkeley. For many years I’ve lived and taught in New York (and for a time lectured in performance and analysis of music at Harvard). I give concerts as a guest soloist with orchestra and occasionally as recitalist and am involved in commissioning new works.

I’ve just read with interest the first installment of your Shostakovich essay. What you wrote resonates with strong memories of growing up as a young musician in the Bay Area in the early '60s. What I recall vividly — just as you described it — is the harsh, dismissive attitude toward Shostakovich, something first and foremost an expression of feverish, us-against-them, Cold War jingoism. Drawn in by the appeal of the Cello Sonata, I became a teenage devotee of Shostakovich’s quartets, as well as the symphonies, of course. Except for the encouragement of my family, this music became forbidden fruit to the adolescent. And I researched, located, and acquired with my allowance scores and parts sent from Musica Rara in London to my home in San Francisco. This was the first of many composer passions over the years, probably a presage of things to come.

I collected LP recordings by the Soviet Beethoven Quartet; they were hard to find, and the only versions then available. And I arrived at Juilliard at age 16 equipped with all of this marvelous music and filled with enthusiasm. Having become a classmate of celebrated young stars, it was a shock to discover how conservative tastes were in New York and how far my enthusiasms were from the mainstream. I believe I’ve never been as disappointed as when I could not interest my friends in reading even one of my prized Shostakovich quartets. Even on the occasion of my 17th birthday chamber-music party, people would not consent to reading more than the first movement of one work, then dismissed the sublimely affecting work with words unfit for publication. Even years later, when I was teaching at Harvard, colleagues thought me mad when I suggested Shostakovich might be the greatest master of slow movements since Beethoven — something I still believe.

I have to confess that, for many years since, I have been enjoying a sense of vindication that, as the world has eventually turned, my view won out. And some of those very same musicians who wouldn't play Shostakovich in my living room have since formed quartets that are celebrated for their Shostakovich cycles. I am happy that this wonderful music has done better than survive. It has prevailed.

I look forward to this week's installment of your writing on Shostakovich. It narrates a sea-change of taste, politics, and perception that, as a musician, I’ve lived through.

— Paul Tobias

David Bratman responds:

Thanks for your interesting letter. I too have striking memories of Shostakovich, and indeed any modern tonal composer, being denigrated ... or not so much denigrated as ignored in discussions of contemporary music. This was in the mid-1970s, and such attitudes were about to undergo a massive change, though it didn't seem to be happening yet. But I did not perceive this as a Cold War jingoist thing.

Instead it was an insistence that the only art that was worthwhile was that which was "experimental" or "cutting-edge" by certain arbitrary definitions. Thus the reference in my article to "the increasingly serialist academy." Serialism was by then a half-century-old hat, but it was still cutting-edge because the public didn't like it.

This all applied to the other arts and to literature, as well, as have the changes since then. Today I think we have a more balanced appreciation of the great in mid-20th century art than we did at the time, or for some years afterward.

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