Shostakovich Symphony No. 14, Barshai, Miroshnikova, Melodiya
The Symphony No. 14 (Opus 135) by Dmitri Shostakovich was completed in the spring of 1969, and was premiered later that year. It is a sombre work for soprano, bass and a small string orchestra with percussion, consisting of eleven linked settings of poems by four authors. Most of the poems deal with the theme of death, particularly that of unjust or early death. They were set in Russian, although two other versions of the work exist with the texts all back-translated from Russian either into their original languages or into German. The symphony is dedicated to Benjamin Britten (who gave the UK premiere the following year). The Fourteenth Symphony was a creative response to Modest Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, which Shostakovich had orchestrated in 1962, as well as to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia following Alexander Dubček's Prague Spring reforms there. Like Mussorgsky, Shostakovich brings back the subject of death in various images and situations. The Mussorgsky cycle contains only four songs — too few to do justice to Mussorgsky's concept, Shostakovich felt. He proceeded to expand it by selecting 11 poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Küchelbecker and Rainer Maria Rilke.
{"Date First Available": "February 13, 2012"}