Dimitri Shostakovich

Perhaps we can have something on here other than nationalistic, militarist macho ego-anthems.

Everyone should go and download anything by Dimitri Shostakovich. One of those guys who was hated by the authorities, but valuable and therefore tolerated.

One famous story is when Shostakovich and an orchestra were practising in Leningrad, during the siege; some of them died of starvation while playing.

Some of the most beautiful, terrifying and moving music ever written.

I was hoping someone would create this topic. Where can I download his musics? I'm looking for his Leningrad Symphony. I have his 24 Preludes and Fugues by the way.

His Leningrad Symphony is available as a Bittorrent here.

Enjoy!

Err, sorry, I don't know how to operate those 'torrent' thingy.. can anyone help me?

Start here: Official Bittorrent site.

Download the client and install it.

Navigate in your web browser to the torrent you want to download. Click on the highlighted filename ending in *.torrent. The Bittorrent client should automatically open and ask you where you want to save the downloaded file. Tell it, click on 'OK', and the download should begin.

When the download has reached 100%, close the Bittorrent client.

You're done.

The important point to remember is that you don't use the Bittorrent client directly to download files. You use your web browser (IE or Firefox) to find the *.torrent file, then click on it to open the client and download the file.

I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any trouble.

Thanks for your assistance comrade! I'm downloading it now.

His 4th symphony is one of the most amazing pieces of music ever written, it is frightening, it is stupendous, it is a masterpiece and one of his greatest works, I recommend you listen to it. What on earth did he mean by the ending, the section just before the actual ending is a very fitting ending for the preceeding movements, yet it is contradicted by a very slow and pathetic ending. He is a genius!

Try his Viola sonata, his last work, for size, it is some of the most beautiful and most symbolic music he wrote, take for instance the extensive quotation of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata to represent Shostakovich's own immortality, as he wished to be remembered as Beethoven was before him. It is not vulgar, however, he changed the time signature and tempo and altered the notation, but it can still be heard and never fails to raise the hairs on my arms! The first section is simply ridden with his own personal pain as he lay on his deathbed writing the music, the horiffic sounding Viola striking out high notes in anguish and pain. Anyway, I could rant all day on this genius, the BEST composer of the Twentieth Century

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His 4th symphony is one of the most amazing pieces of music ever written, it is frightening, it is stupendous, it is a masterpiece and one of his greatest works, I recommend you listen to it.

I completely and utterly agree with you. It's his most Mahlerian work, and the most underrated of his works. It's the work which marks his breakthrough into greatness as a composer, after the juvenilia of his 2nd and 3rd symphonies. The reason it's been neglected is mainly political - it was being rehearsed at the same time as his opera 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk' was being performed. When Stalin saw the opera, he was outraged at its modernism, its sexual frankness and its anti-authoritarian message. Stalin walked out halfway through, and a few days later an article appeared in 'Pravda' entitled 'Chaos instead of music'. Shostakovich was in serious trouble, and might even have been have been arrested. The immediate consequence of all this was that his 4th symphony, which was even more modernist and jagged than his opera, was withdrawn just before its premiere. It remained unperformed for the next three decades. Shostakovich hastily composed his 5th symphony as "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism". The 5th symphony touches all the bases of Socialist Realism and is utterly conventional and bland. Bits of the finale even sound like overblown film music. His 5th is probably his most overrated symphony, while his 4th is his most underrated.

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What on earth did he mean by the ending, the section just before the actual ending is a very fitting ending for the preceeding movements, yet it is contradicted by a very slow and pathetic ending. He is a genius!

I think the ending of the 4th is one of the most extraordinary pieces of music Shostakovich ever composed. After all the Sturm und Drang, all the angst and rage and despair of the preceding movements, we enter a luminous realm of peace and reconciliation. The conflict and rage is burned away to leave transcendently beautiful calm, a glimpse of the 'peace which passes all understanding'. Every time I hear it, I'm enraptured by it again.

And it's a damn sight better as the ending of a symphony than the vulgar bombast of the finale of his 5th.

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Try his Viola sonata, his last work, for size, it is some of the most beautiful and most symbolic music he wrote, take for instance the extensive quotation of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata to represent Shostakovich's own immortality, as he wished to be remembered as Beethoven was before him. It is not vulgar, however, he changed the time signature and tempo and altered the notation, but it can still be heard and never fails to raise the hairs on my arms! The first section is simply ridden with his own personal pain as he lay on his deathbed writing the music, the horiffic sounding Viola striking out high notes in anguish and pain.

Have you heard his 15th symphony? He uses extensive quotation in that work, both from other composers and from his own earlier work. And the ending of the 15th is breathtaking. Shostakovich had suffered a heart attack while composing the 15th, and the coda at the end of the symphony mimics the clicking and whirring of the machines which were keeping him alive in hospital. It is a reminder both of his physical mortality and of his spiritual immortality at the same time. Simply amazing.

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Anyway, I could rant all day on this genius, the BEST composer of the Twentieth Century

I think Stravinsky has the edge over him, but not by much. But yes, an amazing composer. He was one of the glories of Soviet art.

Yes, I have heard his 15th, "to be played as a child in a toy-store", he quotes extensively form the music he loves, like Rossini's William Tell overture and does he also quote from the Light Cavalry Overture?
I see what you mean about the quiet passing of the finale of the 4th, I am to believe that the premiere was at the Edinburgh Festival many years after the work was finished, so perhaps the ending was appended after the 5th to signify that Shostakovich himself had forgotten the rage against the authorities....

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Yes, I have heard his 15th, "to be played as a child in a toy-store", he quotes extensively form the music he loves, like Rossini's William Tell overture and does he also quote from the Light Cavalry Overture?
I see what you mean about the quiet passing of the finale of the 4th, I am to believe that the premiere was at the Edinburgh Festival many years after the work was finished, so perhaps the ending was appended after the 5th to signify that Shostakovich himself had forgotten the rage against the authorities....

I'm not convinced that the 'rage' in his 4th symphony is a musical representation of his rage against the Soviet authorities. There is similar rage and Sturm und Drang in the symphonies of Mahler, yet we don't talk about Mahler's "rage against the authorities", do we? We shouldn't read too much programmatic meaning into Shostakovich's music - it stands in its own right as great art, just as the music of Mahler or Beethoven does.

And I'm certainbly not convinced that the quiet ending to his 4th was simply 'tacked on' as a sop to the Soviet authorities. It is an integral part of the symphony - I really can't understand why you regard the appropriate ending of the symphony to come earlier. There is no evidence that he composed the ending many years after the rest of the symphony. The quiet ending is absolutely right, and is the perfect coda to what has gone before. Why do you think it isn't?

Just look at Schubert's "Great" symphony, the ending is as grandeose and gaudy as the music that had preceeded, the slow coda for Shostakovich's fourth doesn't fit in with the classical precedents that had preceeded in terms of music, for a fast and ferocious piece one would expect a similar ending, it feels out of place to have the slow coda after the bombardment of brass and percussion. There must be a reason to why the slow coda is where it is, at the end, it cannot be just there, then it isn't art, there must be a reason to it!
Though I find it a wonderful ending to a symphony, it still seems to contradict what has happened before, not to forget the theories of "symphonism" floating around the Soviet Artists of the time, it gives a lot of credit to political context to music, Beethoven simply did not write his symphonies about suffering, more to entertain his masters if anything.

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Just look at Schubert's "Great" symphony, the ending is as grandeose and gaudy as the music that had preceeded, the slow coda for Shostakovich's fourth doesn't fit in with the classical precedents that had preceeded in terms of music, for a fast and ferocious piece one would expect a similar ending, it feels out of place to have the slow coda after the bombardment of brass and percussion. There must be a reason to why the slow coda is where it is, at the end, it cannot be just there, then it isn't art, there must be a reason to it!

It only feels 'out of place' for you because you are, dare I say it, rather too conventional in your tastes. There have been cases of symphonies ending quietly rather than with a loud, raucous flourish. Vaughan Williams' 'London' symphony ends quietly, and he ended his 6th with a slow movement. In fact, it's so quiet you can barely hear it. And Shostakovich's own 13th, 14th and 15th symphonies end rather quietly as well. The ending of his 4th certainly doesn't seem out of place to me; it integrates perfectly with the rest of the music. And as for the 'reason' it's there - surely Shostakovich is saying that the dissonance and conflict, the rage of the preceding music is not the final word. The music moves beyond that struggle and rage into a mood in which the conflict has burnt itself out, and there is a timeless, luminous reflection on all that has gone before, until it gradually fades away into the distance....

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Though I find it a wonderful ending to a symphony, it still seems to contradict what has happened before, not to forget the theories of "symphonism" floating around the Soviet Artists of the time, it gives a lot of credit to political context to music, Beethoven simply did not write his symphonies about suffering, more to entertain his masters if anything.

Beethoven had supreme contempt for his 'masters'. He was an early supporter of the French Revolution; this was the equivalent back then to being a supporter of the October Revolution in the 1920s and 30s. He was about as radical as it was possible to be at that time. He did not write his symphonies merely to "entertain his masters", as you put it, any more than Shostakovich did. And the ending to Shostakovich's 4th does not "contradict" what went before it; it transcends it. It's like the Marxist dialectical triad - thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The quiet coda at the end of his 4th is the synthesis of what went before it, not the antithesis.

If the music before the coda is the thesis, where is the antithesis to create the thesis?

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If the music before the coda is the thesis, where is the antithesis to create the thesis?

I just knew you were going to ask that. Alright, maybe I'm pushing it a bit. But there are quiet, reflective moments in the preceding music of his 4th; they just tend to be psychologically overshadowed by the loud, raucous moments (which can be literally overwhelming). The coda serves (to my mind at least) to unify those contrasting moods, which were merely juxtaposed rather than integrated in the preceding movements, and to transcend them. The 4th symphony, for most of its duration, is kaleidoscopic, in the sense that the music consists of sharply contrasted sections which are juxtaposed rather than smoothly integrated. The coda at the end seems to me to pull all these contrasting and conflicting moods together into a transcendent spiritual state which has risen above fragmentation and conflict. Maybe I'm wrong though, but that's just what I feel when I listen to this music.

I finished downloading 7th. They're great.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Bittorrent, Kamerad Tim!

I couldn't download it without your help Comrade Potemkin, thanks again.

The least I could do for a fellow comrade.

And remember: when you download Bittorrent, you're downloading Communism!

I do see what you mean, organised chaos, very much like Stravinsky before, it's something that my conventional tatse has to adapt to in order to appreciate fully.
Would I be more correct in claiming that there is a much greater programmatic base in his famous 10th? There is no way that the second movement (which extensively quotes from the 8th- his symphony of sorrow and devastation) has no political weight! There is no shadow of doubt in my mind that this brutal scherzo represents Stalin himself, after all the symphony was composed shortly after his death, and that of Prokofiev's so perhaps there may be some sorrow for his death too...

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His Leningrad Symphony is available as a Bittorrent here.

Thank you.