On a foggy, cold drizzle of a Sunday

Today is one of those terrible winter days in Ottawa I dislike so much, dark, foggy, freezing drizzle, unpleasant and gray. So I keep busy reviewing my lecture notes for my presentation on portraits that I prepared for the National Gallery of Canada Volunteer program. I have 2 presentations to do this week.

I also look at YouTube to see what might be interesting. I found this July 1942 recording by the American NBC Orchestra under the baton of Arturo Toscanini of the newly composed Symphony no 7  by Shostakovich. It speaks to the 900 day siege of Leningrad ( St-Petersburg) by the Nazi army and of the terrible suffering of the Russian people. It was a desperate fight to save the city, a poem of resistance against a terrible enemy. I read a few months ago a wonderful book on the Hermitage Museum and what happened during the siege and how the employees sacrificed themselves to save the art works. Our guide during our visit in June had spoken to us about the siege and how in her own family there had been many dead. The cruelty of war is often difficult to understand for someone who has not experienced it.



Shostakovich completed the work around December 1941, he and his family were evacuated from Leningrad towards Moscow. The work in the USSR was premiered by the Orchestra of the City of Kouïbychev (today Samara) by maestro Samuel Samossoud. This symphony was dedicated to Leningrad and its people but today it is seen more as a protest against all forms of Totalitarianism including Stalin's rule.

The Second World War saw 25 million dead in Russia alone. Listening to it I see the images of St- Petersburg and to me it is evocative of that terrible period.



I also just finished the recent book of Mary Soames, the last surviving child of Clementine and Winston Churchill. The book is about her early life and the war years accompanying her father and meeting all the great actors of this drama on the world stage. I will write about the book on a future post.

Symphonie no.5

Many years ago I read the biography of Dmitri Shostakovich, (1906-1975), the great XXth Century composer who lived in what can only be described as a very difficult time in Soviet Russia under Stalin and then under years of mediocrity under various Soviet rulers in an crumbling and creaky country.

I love his music, it is so expressive and so very different. Composition was not easy in those days as he had to fit the official party image and doctrine. He would be severely criticized and attacked by Communist Party ideologues often at the urging of Stalin who played a game of cat and mouse with Shostakovich. In Russia, ethnic origin always plays an important part in how the regime views a person, Shostakovich's ancestor were Polish, the family became Russified after living in Russia for several generations. However that was not sufficient for the Soviet Authorities who viewed him with suspicion.

Stalin who remains famous as a violent if not deranged, cruel dictator, had countless people executed for a mere trifling. When he died, Shostakovich was surprised he had survived, so many other artists had perished. Strangely enough Stalin died 5 March 1953 the same day as Sergei Prokofiev, another great composer.

His music is haunting and I like all his work, I picked Symphonie no.5, the conductor is Semyon Bychkov.

                                   Dmitri Shostakovich