"The Year 1917"

I went to the Sanders Theatre this afternoon to see The Dudley House Orchestra.

One of the repertoires is “The Year 1917” composed by Dmitri Shostakovich, a Russian composer of the Soviet period. The symphony is quite grandiose and unique. The reason D. Shostakovich composed this piece was because that the in 1960, the Communist Party directed him to write a symphony celebrating Lenin and the October Revolution of 1917.

The first movement is a grand opening. Then, the music develops even more expressive. (It sounds kind of like Gustav Mahler’s to me, but more elegant and not that deeper.) As for the fourth movement, it even sounds as dramatic as film music t, perhaps a little bit overblown. Some critics assert that the arrangement of the first movement’s inversion in fourth movement is probably ironic sarcasm. They wonder whether this means that “the people’s suffering has been turned around, or their new situation isn’t very different from the old one.”

Over all, the performance is quite professional. The Harvard graduates really did a great job interpreting this master piece.