Dmitry's Tenth

The New York Philharmonic-Symphony gave the first American performance of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony last week and got a divided press. "Obviously the strongest and greatest symphony that Shostakovich has yet produced," cheered the New York Times's Olin Downes. "Sprawling, noisy, lacking in coherent style and even culture," complained the Herald Tribune's new critic, Paul Henry Lang. SHOSTAKOVICH GOOFS, headlined the slangy Daily News.

The music the writers were talking about was a long (50 minutes), restless work full of pretty little melodies. Perhaps in deference to the short concentration span of his audiences, the composer allowed no single idea to develop very long. As of old, Shostakovich showed his ability to stir up a storm of violence, with the brasses braying, the drums thundering, the winds shrieking and the strings pacing along.

The symphony's first and third movements were darkly pensive, shifty, and reflecting Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave as through a flawed windowpane. The scherzo thrummed along at top speed, flinging itself into several swirling climaxes before its few minutes were over. The finale opened with a grumpy subject, developed an Oriental flavor as the winds spun harsh-voiced arabesques, then fell into a heavy-booted Russian two-step. Conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos whipped the fine performance to an uproarious end that brought a storm of applause, a few cheers, and an approving comment from Soviet U.N. Delegate Andrei Vishinsky.

At 48, Dmitry Shostakovich has been up and down the ladder of official Soviet approval. In 1936 his opera-Lady Macbeth of Mzensk was considered "neurotic" (its heroine committed murder out of boredom rather than in the interests of social progress) and was banished from Moscow. During the war his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies were, in effect, official Soviet masterpieces, although non-Soviet ears found them pretty thin stuff. But the Ninth got him into hot water with the party's Central Committee in 1948 (it "smelled strongly of the spirit of modern bourgeois music").

The Tenth has the solid virtues of sturdy orchestration and an unmistakable Russian flavor. However, its reception at its Leningrad premiere ten months ago was almost as divided as Manhattan's.

Chief criticism: the symphony was "profoundly tragic," an artistic attitude considered antithetic to Soviet society, especially if the music depicted a lonely individual. But an answering article got Shostakovich off the hook by inventing a dialectically dazzling new term. The composer, who had dedicated his work to world peace had, it appeared, really written an "optimistic tragedy." Or, as the slogan had it in Orwell's 1984, "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery."

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