admin @ Sun, 2006-09-24 08:00
Next week marks the centenary of the birth of Dmitry Shostakovich, the legendary Soviet composer who walked a fine line between censorship for bourgeois leanings and ridicule for towing the party line.
Russian audiences will be able to judge his success for themselves in coming weeks with a series of new recordings and performances that include a forgotten constructivist ballet and an opera famously banned by Stalin.
The Bolshoi's artistic director Alexei Ratmansky says he is proud to have recreated the “spirit, decorations and costumes of the 1930s,” in a production that opened in 2005 in the ballet's first staging for three-quarters of a century.
In 1931 avant-garde arrived in Moscow, and for the first time Shostakovich chose a modern theme for one of his ballets. A saboteur who is infatuated by a member of the Komsomol communist youth group secretly puts a bolt in the factory equipment in an effort to get rid of a romantic rival.
With a ballet corps of female workers in red headscarves, dances featuring an “opportunist” and a bureaucrat and a procession of malicious capitalists in newspaper boats, the Bolshoi's new production is “lively, coherent and watchable,” one Russian critic said.
“In the West everyone knew that this ballet existed, but nobody had seen it,” said Francois Duplat, a producer with French-German television station Arte, which was scheduled to broadcast the ballet live on Sept. 23.
Several anti-clerical scenes, including the drinking priest that was almost obligatory in the atheistic Soviet era, have been removed for the new Russia, where 64 percent of people consider themselves believers.
The Skytyvkar Opera in Russia's far north has also removed anti-clerical scenes from its production of the Shostakovich ballet “Balda” at the request of the region's diocese. That production, planned for Shostakovich's birthday on Sept. 25, tells the story of a priest deceived by a worker.
The opera was banned, and Shostakovich was forced to rework his opera, removing scenes judged too naturalist and obscene at a time when depictions of sex were frowned upon.
Despite dedicating works to both Stalin and Lenin, Shostakovich was the most spied-upon composer in the Soviet Union, with secret microphones a fixture at his home until the end of his days.
He supported young avant-garde musicians, while at the same time signing a letter condemning the dissident Andrei Sakharov, an act for which he later said he would never forgive himself.
Today the mysteries of Shostakovich are the subject of meticulous attention in Russia, where he is being rediscovered in numerous openings and broadcasts.
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