Now that's what I call music blogging ...

So much quality music had been unfairly forgotten and so much tat put on a pedestal. Top of my tat-list is Dmitri Shostakovich. I personally can't wait for his flatulent 'sarcastic' bubble to burst. A close second and third on the tat-list are two more po-faced Soviet gits, Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina (left). When will that old witchy bore Gubaidulina shut up? When, EH? And when will the quieter craftsmen composers, Edison Denisov, Valentin Silvestrov and Dmitri Smirnov, get their dues?

Igor Toronyi-Lalic reminds us what music blogging should be about on the Telegraph website. And he links to my Elizabeth Maconchy article. Priceless, but I'm not so sure about Silvestrov.

Now read how Soviet blacklist fatigue sets in.
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Comments

Pliable said…
Reading this piece again I do wonder why I spend hours agonising over nuances of phrasing in my posts.

Or is it simply that having a name like Igor Toronyi-Lalic allows you to be very rude about Russian composers?
Garth Trinkl said…
Did the name of composer Elena Firsova inadvertantly get left out here?
Pliable said…
For those having difficulty decoding Garth's comment follow this link.
Garth Trinkl said…
Thanks, pliable, for the decoding help and the link above.

*

fyi, and for what its worth, conductor John McLaughlin Williams, active in unusual classical music recording projects in both the United States and Ukraine, thought that Silvestrov's "Requiem for Larissa" probably should have won a "Grammy Award" for ECM. He considers the Silvestrov work -- along with Franz Schmidt's 4th Symphony, Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Concerto Funebre, Henryk Gorecki's 3rd Symphony, Benjamin Lees' "Memorial Candles" Symphony, Joseph Suk's Asrael Symphony -- to be greater musical masterpieces than John Adams's recently trumpeted and awarded "On the Transmigration of Souls" for Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic.

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