GHCD 2322 Secure E-shop Broadcast & Review	Arthur Rodzinski   Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of NEW YORK shostakovic Symphony No. 8 Live Recording 1944     Track 04 - 3rd Movement Allegro non  troppo Track 06 - 5th Movement Allegretto - Allegro - Adagio - Allegretto

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DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975) - Symphony No.8 in C minor, Op. 65 & Announcement

In the annals of war, nothing can match in scale the Russian and German casualties on Russian soil in the years 1941-44. On June 22^nd 1941, without declaring hostilities, Hitler ordered German armies into the Soviet Union. During the following three months, German victory followed German victory, with the taking of huge numbers of Russian prisoners. The cities of Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Kharkov, Kunsk and Orel were captured, and on October 3^rd Hitler announced that the Russian armies had been crushed. The Soviet government moved many offices to Kyubishev, including various creative artists of all kinds, amongst whom was – eventually – Dmitri Shostakovich, then 35 years old, who took with him the then unfinished manuscript score of his Seventh Symphony, which he had begun in Leningrad a few weeks after the Nazi invasion.

The winter of 1941-42 began early. It was the coldest Russian winter for 150 years, and the siege of Leningrad – old St Petersburg, Shostakovich’s home city – cost the Germans an estimated 170,000 casualties. Shostakovich completed the Seventh Symphony on December 27^th 1941 in Kyubishev, where it was first performed on March 5^th 1942 by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra conducted by Samuel Samosud. The performance was preceded by an introductory talk by the composer, explaining his dedication, on the score, that the Symphony is inscribed ‘To the City of Leningrad’.

The first three movements had been finished by September 29^th, four days after the composer’s birthday, actually in the besieged city. The story of the Symphony, conceived and largely written during the siege of Leningrad, in which Shostakovich also served as a fire-watcher in between writing the music, travelled across the world. Three months after the premiere in Kyubishev, Sir Henry Wood gave the western premiere in a BBC broadcast, and a week later he conducted the first concert performance in the west at a Promenade Concert. On July 19^th 1942, three weeks after the Prom premiere, Arturo Toscanini conducted the first American broadcast in New York City with the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony had become front page news, but the conflict, which Russians term the Great Patriotic War, had more years and hundreds of thousands more casualties to endure.  Just over two weeks after Toscanini’s broadcast, the Germans entered Stalingrad, when bitter house to house fighting ensued.  The Russians fought back, encircling the city in November 1942, and on January 31^st 1943 Field Marshal Frederich von Paulus surrendered. Over 240,000 German soldiers had been lost – killed, starved or frozen to death - in the battle of Stalingrad. Out of a German army of 330,000 men at Stalingrad, only 90,000 were taken prisoner, and Hitler sanctioned state mourning in Germany from February 4^th-7^th. Stalingrad had indeed been saved – but at a price.  With the American victory at Midway in June 1942, the British victory at El Alamein the following November, and Russian victory at Stalingrad two months later, the Axis powers were thereafter fighting from a position of retreat on virtually all fronts.

It was against the background of such momentous events that Shostakovich’s mighty Seventh and Eighth Symphonies were composed. In Russia, the Eighth has always been referred to as the Stalingrad Symphony (it is not dedicated to that city, but to its first conductor, Yevgeny Mravinsky) and these works stand as twin war-time peaks in the composer’s output. They were not of course the only works he wrote during this period. Amongst others – together with much less well-known compositions - the Second Piano Sonata, in particular, also dates from this time. But, of its nature, the Sonata is a more intimate, personal work, compared with the large-scale public symphonies. 

The newsworthy impact the Seventh had made meant that its successor was keenly anticipated. The last movement of the Leningrad is headed ‘Victory’, but no such rejoicing ends the Eighth. Rather is its final ‘message’ - in so far as any music may be said to possess one - that of compassion, of shared suffering in the union of all humanity. The Eighth was completed on September 9^th 1943, and less than two months later Mravinsky conducted the first performance in Moscow.  The Symphony was – perhaps not surprisingly – attacked in Soviet Russia for failing to end in a mood of optimism, as the Leningrad had done.  But Shostakovich’s fame was such that conductors in America vied with each other to give the western premiere. Toscanini, who had given the US premiere of the Seventh (he only conducted the work on that single occasion, never including it again in his programmes), refused the premiere, without even seeing the score, and it fell to the Polish-born Artur Rodzinski to give the western premiere, conducting the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York, at Carnegie Hall on April 2^nd, 1944.

Artur Rodzinski was a good choice for conductor.   He was born in 1892, and studied piano with, amongst others, Emil von Sauer, and conducting with Franz Schalk. He made his conducting debut in Lvov in 1921 and created such an impression that in 1926 Leopold Stokowski appointed him an assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Three years later, Rodzinski became chief conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and in 1933 was named chief conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. At Cleveland, Rodzinski introduced the concept of concert performances of operas, and in this capacity, he conducted the United States premiere of Shostakovich’s opera Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk in January 1935, one year after the opera was first given in Russia. In 1943, Rodzinski was appointed chief conductor of the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York.  During his ten years at Cleveland, he recorded Shostakovich’s First and Fifth Symphonies on 78rpm discs, and he later re-recorded the Fifth in London with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (for contractual reasons, renamed the ‘Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of London’). In Cleveland, Rodzinski performed Shostakovich’s First Symphony on eight occasions, and the Fifth on four.  He had also conducted the Leningrad Symphony twice, as well as other works by Shostakovich, so that when he gave the American premiere of the Eighth, he was one of the most experienced conductors of the composer’s music in the United States. 

American critics were somewhat more generous in their assessment of the Eighth Symphony than their Soviet counterparts had been, but the work disappeared from the programmes of leading US orchestras after the 1945/46 season, a fate which also befell the score in Europe.  It was not until it was taken up by a later generation – led by its dedicatee, Mravinsky – that Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony has come to be recognised as one of the composer’s greatest symphonic utterances.  

In this historic war-time recording, preserved from the broadcast of October 1944 by the New York Philharmonic-Symphony under Rodzinski, we can hear how strongly this very gifted conductor empathised with Shostakovich’s music and the troubled times in which it was composed.  The War was to end finally ten months after this performance was given, when the world looked to a brighter future than perhaps Shostakovich foresaw in this deeply impressive masterpiece.                                             Robert Matthew-Walker © 2007             

Page revised Wednesday April 11 2007