When I saw the title of the thread, my first thought was, "He's already dead." Upon viewing the content, I think it's safe to say no. Shostakovich was surprisingly ill-represented in one of the many meaningless GMG polls of The Best, it is true, but his music is ever-more popular in concert halls and ever-better loved by wide audiences. One of my best friends was led into classical music by Shostakovich, and thinks the composer an ideal way of bringing the new generation to classical, because he is a core part of the canon, emotionally complex and compelling, and also a composer who speaks in a modern, vivid language which can still strike to our cores.
I once met at a concert a pair of 20-something African-Americans with baggy blue jeans and red boxer shorts and chains and the like, who said they made sure to hear every live Shostakovich piece offered in Houston. What other composer can brag of
that?
Enthousiasm for a Naxos cycle: what a joke! Naxos itself is fading. ...Naxos musicians over the great musicians.
What a joke indeed! For anyone with the least bit of knowledge about Naxos, this is a bit like listening to the Glenn Beck Program. The stuff Naxos is up to these days is immensely exciting, and given that they now regularly record artists like Cho-Liang Lin, the London Symphony Orchestra, and Aldo Ciccolini, there is no pejorative in "Naxos musicians." Indeed, this month's Naxos Blu-Ray release features Valery Gergiev conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Berlioz'
Benvenuto Cellini.
