Monday September 14, 2009

Colorado College Summer Music Festival
Festival Orchestra
Scott Yoo, conducting
Igor Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments 14:23 (6/22/08)
Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Op. 10 30:24 (7/1/08)
Also, Charley anticipates the Boulder Philharmonic's season opening gala this Saturday.
Johannes Brahms: Hungarian Dance No.3
Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger Overture 10:22
Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra
Michael Butterman, conductor (11/4/06)



Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Opus 10
I. Allegretto--Allegro non troppo
II. Allegro
III. Lento
IV. Allegro molto--Lento--Allegro molto

Shostakovich entered the Leningrad Conservatory at thirteen. To make money, he played piano every afternoon and evening at a drafty movie theater. Somehow, he found the time to work on his First Symphony, which he finished in June, 1925.
He submitted the new work as a graduation exercise at the Conservatory and a performance was scheduled. After the first rehearsal, the young composer exclaimed, ``Everything sounds--everything is all right!''
Nikolai Malko conducted the first performance, in Leningrad on May 12, 1926, just four months before Shostakovich's twentieth birthday. The composer's mother was in the audience. ``All went more than brilliantly--a splendid orchestra and magnificent execution!'' she reported. ``But the greatest success went to Dmitri. The audience listened with enthusiasm and the scherzo had to be played twice. At the end Dmitri was called to the stage over and over again. When our handsome young composer appeared, looking almost like a little boy, the enthusiasm turned into one long thunderous ovation.''
Bruno Walter saw the score and was ``struck at once by this magnificent work, by its true symphonic form.'' He conducted the work in Berlin. Meanwhile, Leopold Stokowksi brought the Symphony to the United States, and Shostakovich's international reputation was launched.
The Symphony begins with a flourish by the muted trumpet. Charles Burr says ``it is Shostakovich `signing in,' as it were.'' James Lyons writes: ``The entire Symphony is to grow out of the material disclosed in this short introduction--a sort of author's preface at once arch, quizzical, cryptic, even philosophical, but beguiling in its deftness and directness of purely musical expression.''