PRESS RELEASE:
Plainfield Symphony’s 97th Season Opening Concert:
“Shostakovich’s Testament: 10th Symphony”
Under the baton of its dynamic conductor Charles Prince, the Plainfield Symphony Orchestra opens its 97th Season on October 8, 2016 with the powerful and timeless symphonies of two legendary composers, Dmitri Shostakovich and Mozart, in a concert entitled “Shostakovich’s Testament: 10th Symphony”. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear the seldom performed
Shostakovich masterpiece, a powerful reflection on the aftermath of the Stalin years.
The program will feature a work that many believe to be the greatest of Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphonies, Symphony No.10 in E minor op. 93 (1953), a work largely evoking tragedy, despair, terror, and violence and two minutes of triumph. The most widely accepted interpretation of the work has been that it is a depiction of the brutal and terrifying Stalin years in Russia. The first movement opens mysteriously, with echoes of klezmer music where Shostakovich uses a quasi-folk-like type of repetition and modification, through which it transforms a theme that nevertheless remains clearly recognizable. The march – “a musical portrait of Stalin and the Stalin years” – is music of unremitting terror and frenzied violence. In the third-movement waltz, the composer introduces himself into the music with a motto derived from the German transliteration of his name, DSCH (D, E flat, C, B natural). This movement, one of introspection and fragility, also has a hidden love song motif, weaving in the first name of a favorite student, Elmira Nazirova. The finale, beginning slowly, bit by bit transforms itself into a Jewish wedding-dance that gets faster and faster until, at the end, the orchestra hurls out one final time the four notes of Shostakovich’s initials, a resolute assertion of the individual’s triumph over a soulless, dehumanizing regime.
Rounding out the program is Symphony No. 36 in C major, K. (425 (the Linz Symphony), written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in late 1783. The opening movement begins, for the first time in Mozart but after the fashion of Joseph Haydn, with a tension-filled slow introduction before launching into a blazing Allegro. The Andante introduces trumpets and drums into a symphonic slow movement for the first time, lending a mood of tragedy and drama to the otherwise gracious and melodic music. The Minuet includes a wittily elegant duet for oboe and bassoon and the dazzling finale, to be played “as fast as possible,” is a profusion of subtly developed thematic ideas.
TIME: 7:00 PM
DATE: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2016
PLACE: CRESCENT AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH AT 716 WATCHUNG AVE, PLAINFIELD
