Symphony No. 3 for chorus & orchestra in B flat minor, Op. 22
Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Op. 54
To the extent that Dmitry Kabalevsky has been viewed as the Soviet composer par excellence, his reputation has suffered in the west, especially since the end of the Cold War. Certainly, some of his less politically rewarded contemporaries have risen to greater prominence in the same period, and this demonstrates a shift in public opinion, from favoring the tuneful and conservative music of Kabalevsky to exploring the deeper, agonized expressions of such artists as Dmitry Shostakovich and Mieczyslaw Weinberg. Particularly in ...
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To the extent that Dmitry Kabalevsky has been viewed as the Soviet composer par excellence, his reputation has suffered in the west, especially since the end of the Cold War. Certainly, some of his less politically rewarded contemporaries have risen to greater prominence in the same period, and this demonstrates a shift in public opinion, from favoring the tuneful and conservative music of Kabalevsky to exploring the deeper, agonized expressions of such artists as Dmitry Shostakovich and Mieczyslaw Weinberg. Particularly in the realm of the symphony, Kabalevsky's four symphonies are far less significant than Shostakovich's fifteen or Weinberg's twenty five, which reflect in their troubled music much of what was wrong in the Soviet Union, while Kabalevsky's adhere to the party line and portray a heroic Russian populism that rings false today. This is not to say that Kabalevsky's symphonies are bad music, for they are constructed quite well in the expansive, late Romantic style, and anyone who...
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