Shostakovich was just 19 years old when he wrote his First Symphony. It propelled him to international fame.
Performed by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Tung-Chieh Chuang.
Tung-Chieh Chuang Photo: Harald Hoffman, supplied
Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Mahler are all widely cited as influences in this symphony, and yet we hear a young mind able to consume those influences and re-imagine them in an already unique musical voice.
Shostakovich began the work as a conservatory assignment and it became his graduation piece, but initially he downplayed its worth, writing in 1924: "Now I’m writing a symphony … which is quite bad, but I have to write it so that I can be done with the conservatory this year."
His belief in the work grew however, maybe in part a response to his teacher's criticism of the "grotesque" nature of the scherzo (later labelled Allegro).
On completing two movements, he wrote to a friend that it might be more fitting to call the work a "symphony-grotesque".
A tonal shift was to occur for the last two movements: "I am in a terrible mood," he wrote. "Sometimes I just want to shout. To cry out in terror. Doubts and problems. All this darkness suffocates me. From sheer misery, I’ve started to compose the finale of the symphony. It’s turning out pretty gloomy."
With a two-piano version presented for assessment, Shostakovich passed. Mission accomplished and free of the conservatory, he can't have realised that the work would propel him to international fame as a poster-boy Soviet composer. But its full orchestral premiere in Leningrad a year later in 1926 did just that.
Shostakovich called the premiere his "second birth".
Bruno Walter performed the symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic; Toscanini and Klemperer both had a turn and it reached the States by 1928 with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski.
Programme Note by Kevin Keys
Recorded by RNZ in Auckland Town Hall, 8 August 2019
Producer: Tim Dodd; Engineer: Rangi Powick
