Sandwich
AS it mere accident, or was there some satirical intent in the fact that in a recent 1YC programme, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony was played between Brahms’s Symphony in D Major and Mozart’s Quartet in B Flat? Whatever the explanation, the effect on me was to emphasize the individuality of the Brahms work, the sensuous joy of the first movement, the melancholy of the andante and the life and breadth of the finale; to point up the feeling, grace and formal beauty of Mozart’s quartet ‘and to underline the amorphous quality of Shostakovich’s piece, its obviousness and its pretentiousness. Perhaps, however, Shostakovich himself is not wholly to blame for the commonplaces of this symphony, since it represents his "practical reply to just criticism" and depicts "the re-education of a human mind through willpower and reason under the influence of the new ideals." (If only we could hear Brahms’s and Mozart’s comments on such motives for composing a symphony!) Much more satisfying, perhaps, because less selfconscious, was the familiar Concerto for piano, trumpet and orchestra, on the same programme, with its grotesque "Poor Jenny is A-weeping" reminiscences and Eileen Joyce’s barrel-house gymnastics, in which the high spirits and the Audenish mood reveal a welcome absence of ideological preoccupations.
J.C.
R.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 548, 23 December 1949, Page 10
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209Sandwich New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 548, 23 December 1949, Page 10
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