Great Masters Shostakovich Life Music

Discover the extraordinary life, times, and art of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975), great musical master and flawed but faithful witness to the survival of the human spirit under totalitarianism. He is without a doubt one of the absolutely central composers of the 20th century. His symphonies and string quartets are mainstays of the repertoire.

Ludwig van Beethoven was one of the most prolific and inspiring forces in the history of music. With his brilliant compositions and his unique approach to the piano, he changed the face of western concert music forever. After Beethoven nothing could ever be the same again.

In both his life and his music, Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) was a man of contrasts. He composed serious Teutonic music and joyful dance music. He was miserly with himself and exceedingly generous with family and associates. He was kind to working people and known for his biting, malicious wit in artistic and aristocratic social circles.

"I am thrice homeless, as a Bohemian in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, as a Jew throughout the world—everywhere an intruder, never welcomed." Thus spoke Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), composer, conductor, symphonist. More than many other composers, Gustav Mahler's works are highly personal expressions of his inner world, a world characterized by an overwhelming alienation and loneliness.

In this course by Professor Robert Greenberg you meet the Schumanns—brilliant, gifted, troubled, and unique in the history of music. Robert Schumann (1810–1856) and his wife Clara Wieck Schumann (1819–1896) have earned a distinct place in the annals of Western music. As a couple with a two-career marriage—he as a pioneering critic and composer, she as one of the leading concert pianists of Europe—they were highly exceptional in their own time though they seem very contemporary in ours.

On her second KALEIDOS album, cellist Joanna Sachryn and her piano partner Paul Rivinius present two important representatives of New Music.

Celebrated international pianist Peter Donohoe continues his series of Shostakovich releases with the contrasting pairs of Piano Concertos and Piano Sonatas, works covering some four decades of the composer's creative life.

Galina Pavolovna Vishnevskaya became the most exciting soprano to emerge in the Soviet Union after World War II. She had a major career on the Bolshoi stage, cruelly cut short due to the political beliefs of her and her husband.

The seventh entry in Vasily Petrenko's outstanding sequence of Shostakovich symphonies pairs two works that stand at opposing poles of Shostakovic's creative life but present similar interpretive puzzles. The 2nd Symphony, written to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, begins with music as modernistic as anything Shostakovich ever wrote but ends in a bombastic choral setting of Leninist agitprop poetry. The 15th Symphony, the composer's last, swerves from an almost giddy sense of play to death-haunted musings to a bleak serenity; along the way Shostakovich mixes in enigmatic allusions to Rossini and Wagner. In both pieces, esteem for the music sits alongside bafflement at what these pieces mean, and what they say about the composer's elusive inner life.

The second release on the Mariinsky label features Shostakovich's first and final symphonies. Valery Gergiev made award-winning recordings of Symphonies 4-9 for Philips, however he will release a complete cycle on the Mariinsky label, starting with the symphonies he has not previously recorded.