Keeping Score - Revealing Classical Music - Shostakovich's Symphony No 5 (includes concert performance) BLU-RAY
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DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
Keeping Score - Revealing Classical Music - Shostakovich's Symphony No 5 (includes concert performance) BLU-RAY
The San Francisco Symphony / Michael Tilson Thomas
[ San Francisco Symphony Bly-ray / Blu-ray Disc ]
Release Date: Friday 20 February 2015
This item is currently out of stock. It may take 6 or more weeks to obtain from when you place your order as this is a specialist product.
Suitable for General Audiences
Following the success of the enlightening first series of Keeping Score, MTT and SFS return with three further programmes that combine one-hour documentaries with live concert performances. The new programmes explore the music and stories behind the music.
Each of the three DVDs in Keeping Score Series 2 features a documentary episode - with MTT guiding us through the composers' perspectives and influences - coupled with a live concert performance of each work. The programmes are designed to engage and entertain viewers of all levels of musical background. With outstanding production values, they are released on DVD and Blu-Ray HD formats, making SFS the first orchestra to distribute its product on Blu-Ray disc.
In 1937 Russia, at the height of Stalin's purges, the Communist Party strongly denounced Dmitri Shostakovich's most recent works. Fearing for his life, the young composer wrote a symphony ending with a rousing march. But to many, the triumph rang hollow. Even today, people wonder just what Shostakovich was trying to say. Was the symphony meant to celebrate Stalin's regime? Or did it contain hidden messages protesting the very system it seemed to support?
Classical music historian Michael Tilson Thomas hosts this unusual glimpse into the life and work of seminal Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, which rests on an unusual historical footnote. The program delineates how, although Shostakovich feared for his life at the hands of the Soviet Army (because of an opera publicly condemned in a local paper), he successfully attempted to "redeem" himself writing a hymn to the motherland, the 1937 Symphony No. 5. It then makes a radical suggestion: the composer may have buried sharp criticism of the U.S.S.R. within the composition. Thomas explores this idea at length, against the backdrop of Shostakovich's personal history, and dissects the composition in question. As an added bonus, the program includes a full-length concert rendition of the work by the San Francisco Symphony, mounted and filmed at the Royal Albert Hall in London. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
