A reasonable, if slightly cynical question to ask about this set including Shostakovich's completion and orchestration of Benjamin Fleischmann's opera Rothschild's Violin and his own incomplete opera The Gamblers might be, "Wouldn't it have been smarter, and more of a gift to posterity, if Shostakovich had used the time and energy he spent on Fleischmann's opera completing his own?" History is of course too complicated to accommodate simple answers to questions like that; Shostakovich never completed The Gamblers because of ...
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A reasonable, if slightly cynical question to ask about this set including Shostakovich's completion and orchestration of Benjamin Fleischmann's opera Rothschild's Violin and his own incomplete opera The Gamblers might be, "Wouldn't it have been smarter, and more of a gift to posterity, if Shostakovich had used the time and energy he spent on Fleischmann's opera completing his own?" History is of course too complicated to accommodate simple answers to questions like that; Shostakovich never completed The Gamblers because of the strong likelihood that Soviet authorities would never have allowed it to be produced, and he completed Fleischmann's Violin, the work of one of his favorite students who was killed in the siege of Leningrad, because he saw its musical and dramatic power and believed it deserved to be brought before the public. Its style is close to Shostakovich's, but its extensive use of folk idioms mark it as the work of a different artistic temperament. It's a dramatically direct piece, with...
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