Dmitry Shostakovich: the genius behind the curtain

It's the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975), a visionary 20th-century composer whose glorious, tormented and thought-provoking music attracted both esteem and censure in his homeland.

Some of those works will be heard in the Seattle Symphony's upcoming Shostakovich Festival, in honor of the composer's centenary.

Such anniversaries are beloved in the concert-presenting business as hooks on which to hang their musical offerings — but no one really needs an excuse to fete Shostakovich, who wrote some great symphonies, concertos and other music for orchestra.

Forged in political and musical controversy, his music has tremendous emotional power drawn from experience (he was a firefighter during the German siege of Leningrad, which began in 1941).

A survivor

A wunderkind among composers, Shostakovich found immediate success at 19 with his Symphony No. 1 and was lauded for representing "the best traditions of Soviet culture"; he eventually was denounced twice by Stalin and withdrew or concealed several later works.

His career revived following the popular Symphony No. 5, but he later was censured again (for "formalism" and "anti-people art"), and relieved of his conservatory professorship from 1948 to 1960.

Most of his career was a lesson in survival as a closet dissident. As the great pianist/conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy wrote in the Financial Times, "Shostakovich acted heroically within his chosen medium, saying in music what was then absolutely unthinkable to say in words and managing, against all the odds, not only to survive but to leave for posterity great music of shattering intensity and quintessential spiritual and musical validity."

"Even if they cut my hands off I will still continue to compose," Shostakovich once said. "Even if I have to hold my pen in my mouth, I will go on writing music."

The festival

Among the high points concertgoers will encounter in the coming days:

• A visit by the Russian National Orchestra , the only private (nonstate-supported) symphony orchestra in that country. On the podium is the legendary Mikhail Pletnev, also famed as a musical philosopher and one of the world's great pianists.

They're doing an all-Russian program with one of the biggest and toughest of all the piano concertos, the Rachmaninoff Third (29-year-old Alexander Mogilevsky is the piano soloist).

• A unique joint concert , featuring both the Russian National Orchestra and the Seattle Symphony on the Benaroya Hall mainstage together, with Pletnev and Seattle's Gerard Schwarz sharing conducting duties in two great Fifths (of Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky).

• The return of Mstislav Rostropovich, one of the world's great cellists and a passionate conductor, leading the Seattleites in a Shostakovich-heavy program that starts out with the Festive Overture and Symphony No. 1, plus the Prokofiev Fifth. Rostropovich and Shostakovich were longtime friends; the composer wrote some of his great cello works for Rostropovich.

In addition, Wagnerian diva Jane Eaglen is featured with Schwarz on the podium in rare performances of Russian arias by Tchaikovsky and Glinka.

Another big plus for music-history fans is the arrival of Richard Taruskin, a University of California, Berkeley professor who is one of today's most distinguished musicologists. He will give the pre-concert lectures for the Rostropovich events, speaking on "Hot Wars, Cold Wars and Symphonies."

That is an apt topic, because Shostakovich suffered not only the "hot war" (World War II) but also the Cold War that followed. Censured by Stalin, he composed symphonies and chamber music in which satirical mockery is never far below the surface of the more grandiose martial themes.

More Shostakovich is on display in a new Naxos CD, issued this month, with Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony in robust, colorful performances of two symphonic poems: "The Execution of Stepan Razin" (a 1967 work featuring the Seattle Symphony Chorale and bass-baritone soloist Charles Robert Austin), and "October" (1964), as well as "Five Fragments" (1935).

"Awe-inspiring"

Russia has no shortage of great orchestras and conductors, but the Russian National Orchestra (RNO) occupies a unique place. Instead of long tradition, it has brilliance on its side.

Only a year after the RNO's formation in 1990 (with Pletnev as founding conductor), one Gramophone Magazine critic wrote of its first recording: "an awe-inspiring experience; should human beings be able to play like this?"

The first Russian orchestra ever to win a Grammy Award (in 2004), the RNO has now made more than 30 CDs. It functions in a most unusual way: Instead of a music director, there is a sort of international conductors' consortium called the RNO Conductor Collegium (made up of maestros who share the orchestra's leadership).

In recent years, the RNO has earned an extra measure of celebrity following its 2000 appointment of conductor Carlo Ponti Jr., as one of the orchestra's associate conductors. The glamorous young maestro is the son of actress Sophia Loren.

When the RNO made its Benaroya Hall debut in 2001, conductor Pletnev was along as a piano soloist (with Vladimir Spivakov on the podium), earning a rapturous reception from concertgoers and critics.

Here's betting that a lot of those "Need two tickets!" signs will be hoisted again, as in 2001, outside the hall by hopeful music lovers who didn't get to the box office soon enough.

Melinda Bargreen: mbargreen@seattletimes.com