What I’ve Been Listening to Lately: Shostakovich 14
One of the relatively few remaining late Shosty pieces which I had not yet up to this point had much exposure to is the 14th symphony. The reason for the lack of exposure was mostly because I had been put off by the operatic nature of it, which even still feels annoying and grandiose at times. The thing is, when I start to like pieces involving voice they seem to have become favorites (at least with Shostakovich: the Alex Blok and Marina Tsvetaeva poems, and the 13th symphony) but there is a rather large hurdle to getting into them still. (Resist… dorky analogy… ahh screw it: the activation energy is high even though the free energy change is large and negative. Euugh.)
For everyone else who hasn’t been exposed to it, it’s less of a symphony and more of a song cycle. It contains the setting to music of 11 poems all of which are rather not cheerily about death. Yes, classic depressed, sparsely orchestrated, uncertainly tonal late Shostakovich. Nice. It veers between moping, melancholy strings and astringent clanging chromaticism. Confusingly there are three different authorized versions of the piece, one in Russian, one in German, and one in the original languages (almost… “Loreley” is still in German) of the poems.
In fact, the high point of the cycle/symphony so far is Lorelei (or Loreley), which I incidentally hated at first. Here’s one of the best bits:
I’ll write about this movement a bit more in a few days probably, but at this point the heroine, Lorelei, is throwing herself off a cliff into the Rhine — and not too surprisingly this is the big climax of the song. I love how the frantic strings bubblingly warp into the tolling of the bell. Even better is the harmonization of voice and strings in the eerie section that follows, it’s smudged and not quite resolving, kind of creepily innocent. I know negative amounts of stuff about vocal techniques, but whatever the voice equivalent of glissando (sliding between notes) is sounds fantastic (quite literally) here.
March 19th, 2008 at 7:49 am
It’s “portamento” — your Word for the Day.
Classical vocal technique is a real stumbling block for a lot of folks; the way classical singers use their voices is hard for many people to get used to, if you aren’t into it from early in life. I guess it’s like a taste for broccoli.
My older son, who has done a lot of singer-songwriter stuff, decided at one point that he wanted to take voice lessons, so I enrolled him with a teacher at a local music school. On the day of his first lesson, I took him to the building. As we walked down the hall, approaching the room the teacher was in, we heard her vocalizing as a warm-up, and he wanted to turn around and run. That certainly wasn’t the kind of singing he wanted to learn! Needless to say, he didn’t continue the lessons.
March 25th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Hi Jon,
Thanks for being a reverse dictionary
Vocal pieces really do seem to inhabit a distinct realm, with their own lingo and feel. It’s something I have only managed to make baby-steps into so far.