This Week in Classical Music-March 29, 2009

by: Randy Kinkel

March 29, 2009

Shostakovich

This Week in Classical Music-March 29, 2009

( Phoenix )
• New Shostakovich Opera discovered
• Jarvi pleads not guilty to DUI

This Week in Classical Music 3/29/09

It’s This Week in classical Music, an update on what’s happening in the classical music world; I’m Randy Kinkel.

"Large fragments" of Orango, a satirical opera D. Shostakovich was secretly composing in 1932, have been unearthed in Moscow. The English composer Gerard McBurney, who previously arranged five of Shostakovich's works, currently constitutes these fragments into a performance-based score. Orango is a "biomorph" -- half-man and half-monkey -- the most advanced product of Soviet science. The recovered fragments from the first act begin with his revelation to an ecstatic Soviet public and a stupefied Western world. In spite of his recent creation, Orango becomes an influential journalist and a first-rate speaker, even though his speeches are occasionally interrupted by primal screams. The opera in three acts culminates in the nomination of Orango as the Secretary General of the Communist Party. After being dangerously criticized by Stalin's regime for Lady Macbeth, Shostakovich was no longer in a position to even mention that he had worked on such a project, let alone to finish it. Gerard McBurney hopes to complete the orchestration by the middle of 2009. As McBurney is the artistic advisor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, it is possible that the posthumous creation of this political satire of the Soviet Union will take place later this year in the US.

A lawyer for Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra conductor Paavo Jarvi has entered a plea of not guilty to a drunken driving charge. Jarvi was arrested last week in Fairfax, just East of Cincinnati. Police say he was asleep at the wheel of a running car stopped at an intersection. According to police, the Grammy-winning maestro failed a field sobriety test and refused a breathalyzer test. The 48-year-old Jarvi has been the Cincinnati orchestra’s conductor since 2001; his contract expires in 2012.

For more on these and other items and events, go to the website, kbaq.org,; be listening each week at this time for another update, and join me every weekday at noon for the Mozart Buffet, an hour of music by Mozart and his contemporaries; I’m Randy Kinkel, for This Week in Classical Music, on 89-five KBAQ Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.

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