OK, I think we’re going to wrap up the short survey of classical works that either appeared, or were composed, in 1925, thus giving us an idea of where classical music was one hundred years ago. (I’m not bored of the topic at all, but there’s another one I’m wanting to explore, so time to move on!)

One of the great symphonists of the twentieth century was the Russian-Soviet master Dmitri Shostakovich. He wrote fifteen symphonies over the course of his prolific musical life, and taken together they form a fascinating picture of the musical and artistic life that was possible during the Soviet Union. Shostakovich, like all artists in those regimes, had to walk a tight rope of expressing himself in his art while also pleasing the masters in charge of everything, and no, he was not always successful on either score.

I always find Shostakovich’s music more appealing than his contemporary, Sergei Prokofiev’s. I’m not really sure why; perhaps it lies on Shostakovich’s tendency to a starker sound and his sometimes satirical, if not outright sarcastic, tone. In some of his works there is an outright tone of mockery going on. For some this can date his work, but for me it depicts something fascinating. Among the standard emotion there is real humor in Shostakovich’s music, even if it tends to be dark humor, the kind of humor that is whispered in the background lest someone in authority hear.

Shostakovich completed his first symphony in 1925 (though it was not actually premiered until 1926). He was only 19 years old when he wrote it, and it is in some ways a student piece. The work’s orchestration is particularly interesting; Shostakovich employs interesting instrument mixes throughout, such as starting the symphony with a duet between a trumpet and a bassoon. A piano is used in the work, not as a soloist, but as a part of the orchestral tableau. I always find something rather refreshing about listening to Shostakovich, which I suppose springs from my main temperament when it comes to Russian music: with Shostakovich you get the Big and the Epic, but not necessarily the Giant Sweeping Heart-on-their-Sleeve TUNE that you get with the Tcaikovskys and the Borodins and the Rachmaninoffs of the world.

Here is the Symphony No. 1 in F minor by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Continuing my small survey of the classical music of 1925, one hundred years ago, we have a work by one of the most interesting composers of the 20th century. George Antheil is mainly known as an “avant-garde” composer, and in keeping with that label he composed a great deal of experimental music that made use of mechanistic sounds, as he was initially fascinated by the sounds of industry. He wrote a work called Ballet mecanique, which calls for, among other things, sixteen player pianos. Antheil wasn’t just about sonic experiment for the sake of sonic experiment, though; he would later find work scoring films in Hollywood, and this work required a more traditional tonal hand. How traditionally tonal he was is for the listener to determine.

A Jazz Symphony is Antheil’s work from 1925. The work, which premiered at the same concert as Ballet mecanique, created quite the stir in 1925, but to our ears now it sounds like exactly what it claims to be: a work for orchestra that is deeply steeped in jazz. American music was at the time starting to embrace jazz as more than just a “Tin Pan Alley” kind of thing, and Antheil was part of the first wave of such composers.

(An interesting footnote on Antheil, who is mainly known as a composer: he worked during World War II with actress Hedy Lamarr to co-invent a new radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that would not be subject to Axis frequency jamming.) 

UPDATE: Apparently my fingers weren’t doing things right when I wrote this post, as I came up with two different spellings of “Respighi”. This has been fixed. Weird how some words and names just defy our fingers, for those of us who type quickly in an untrained fashion!

Concluding (or maybe just continuing, I haven’t decided yet) our rather capricious look back at the classical music of one hundred years ago is another work that arrived in 1925. While I had never heard this piece before, I am familiar with the composer: Ottorino Respighi, the Italian composer of such spectacular orchestral showpieces as The Pines of Rome. This work, Rossiniana, is a four-movement orchestral suite that derives from four piano pieces written by Giacomo Rossini. If Rossiniana sounds much less “modern” than we would expect for a work from 1925, that’s the reason: Respighi’s source material dates from the 1850s and 1860s.

That’s a useful reminder, I think: art is often as much about looking back as it is about looking ahead. Respighi updates these salon pieces by Rossini, orchestrating them with his own flair for orchestral writing. The result is something that is somehow old and a little modern. Maybe just a little modern.

Here is Rossiniana by Ottorino Respighi.