Russia marks 100th birthday of Shostakovich

MOSCOW -- It's a rare talent that would make internationally acclaimed cellist Mstislav Rostropovich feel second-rate. Dmitri Shostakovich had it.\nRostropovich is among the renowned musicians who will put the wide and contradictory breadth of Shostakovich's vision on full display this month as Russians observe the 100th anniversary of his birth. The celebration will include a concert by Moscow Conservatory's orchestra, which will perform Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony conducted by Rostropovich.\nAhead of the concert, which takes place Monday, the birth anniversary, Rostropovich reminisced about hearing rehearsals of the symphony when he was a Shostakovich pupil at the conservatory in 1943.\n"To this day, I cannot forget the impression that the Eighth Symphony made on me," he said. "I understood then that I had to stop. I gave up writing music. That was it."\nShostakovich's music stands as a sharp contrast to that of this year's other celebrated musical birthday boy, Wolfgang Mozart, whose hummable strains have drenched the airwaves in observance of the 250th anniversary of his birth. Though Shostakovich's oeuvre isn't without merriment, his most noted works can be forbidding -- with dissonances, sometimes-jagged rhythms and flirtations with avant-garde techniques -- and they are awash in the troubles that plagued the man and his native land.\nShostakovich is probably best known worldwide for his Seventh and Eighth symphonies, both written during the misery of World War II and putting the listener through an emotional wringer.\nThe Seventh, known as the "Leningrad," was hailed as a triumph, a hymn against fascism and a tribute to the suffering wrought by the Nazi blockade of Leningrad, where Shostakovich was born when it was still named St. Petersburg. A ballet version of that symphony is the centerpiece of a birthday performance by the Mariinsky orchestra and dance company in St. Petersburg.\nThe Eighth is a full hour of bleakness, from the chilling opening notes to the extended, quiet fade-out of the end in which sweet and minor harmonies play like a dying soldier thinking of his girlfriend.\nAudiences had expected something more rousing; Communist authorities did, too, and the symphony was taken out of Soviet orchestras' repertoire until the 1960s. Like many of his works, the Eighth symphony got a warmer reception abroad; its U.S. premiere was broadcast live on more than 130 radio stations.\nShostakovich himself said the philosophy behind the symphony "can be expressed in two words: life's wonderful."\nScholars perpetually debate such writings, looking for clues as to what extent Shostakovich's statements were cowed by the Stalinist climate of fear. Shostakovich worked under extraordinary pressure, twice suffering official denunciations -- which in many cases, though not his, were precursors to imprisonment, forced exile or even execution.