Russian philharmonic orchestra biography of william shakespeare
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How Shakespeare has inspired composers through the centuries
‘He really didn’t have to die,’ a pre-teen me whispered at an underground cinema in post-revolutionary Tehran, where a heavily censored utgåva of Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet had somehow magically funnen its way to the screen. Soon my quiet sobbing was drowned in Shostakovich’s begravning March as Fortinbras’s solders carried Hamlet’s body out of Elsinore. This was my first encounter not only with Shostakovich’s music but also with Shakespeare: ‘Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty mot this night.’ Berlioz was surely not exaggerating when he exclaimed: ‘To arrive at 45 or 50 without knowing Hamlet! To have lived that long in the dark!’ Back in Tehran I was thankfully much younger. But my life would be shaped for ever bygd the magnificent power of music and Shakespeare.
‘Their savage eyes turn’d to a modest gaze / By the sweet power of music’
(The Merchant of Venice)Shostakovich’s scores for Kozintsev’
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Tchaikovsky & Shakespeare
About this recording
Tchaikovsky and Shakespeare
Tchaikovsky was an avid reader, in French and in Russian, and a passionate theatregoer, which is perhaps not altogether surprising, given his essentially theatrical, selfdramatizing temperament. One of the playwrights of whose work he saw a great deal was Shakespeare, who during Tchaikovsky’s lifetime had rapidly risen to the position of being among the most performed writers on the Russian stage: in 1830, the critic Pletnev had asked, in his Thoughts on Macbeth, “why read other writers when [Shakespeare] contains them all?”, and when Pushkin wrote his Little Tragedies he had openly adopted Shakespeare as his model. But it was the performance of Hamlet given by the great actor Pavel Mochalov in Moscow in 1837 which was the decisive event in establishing Shakespeare on the Russian stage. In the 19th century, until the 1840s, Russian art had been lost, aimlessly trying to base itself on French models
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Russian Symphony Orchestra Society
| Russian Symphony Orchestra Society | |
|---|---|
Advertisement for the orchestra's first performance on January 7, 1904 | |
| Founded | 1903 (1903) |
| Disbanded | 1922[1] |
| Location | New York City |
The Russian Symphony Orchestra Society (also known simply as the Russian Symphony Orchestra) was founded in 1903 (1903) in New York City[2][3] by Modest Altschuler, and functioned for fifteen years.[3]
Oscar Levant described the orchestra as having constituted "a school for concertmasters"; among its members were Frederic Fradkin (concertmaster of the Boston Symphony), Maximilian Pilzer (concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic), Ilya Skolnik (concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony), and Louis Edlin (concertmaster of the National Orchestral Association).[4] Film music conductors Nikolai Sokoloff (who was himself at one point the Russian Symphony Orchestra's concertmaster[5]), Nathani