[mbhaub]

Craft was the worst thing that happened to Stravinsky's music. It's no surprise that he has other terrible opinions and ideas.

I kept reading this thread thinking someone must eventually say what you did. Thanks! You're right. Craft was undeniably a fine musician - but not a great composer. So, as happens too often in music, he rode to fame and glory on the coattails of a giant and steered the master into doing some stupid things. Craft was so beholden to modernism, serialism and other musical dead ends that Shostakovich, who was really pretty traditional, was a natural enemy and target. Craft was utterly wrong - Shostakovich was a great composer. Was he as great as Beethoven, Brahms, or Prokofieff? Maybe not. He sure wrote his share of duds and a good amount of dreck - mostly to stay alive and make people happy. But the composer of Lady Macbeth, Symphonies 1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 14, many of the string quartets, the 24 preludes and fugues for piano...those are pretty convincing proof of his stature.

 

[mbhaub]

Can you name this dreck explicitly?

The second and third symphonies. Maybe the 11th. The Song of the Forests. Poem of the Motherland.

He wrote a lot of film music and thanks to the Capriccio label a lot of it made its way to my library - alas, there's a lot of 2nd rate music there but that's ok - it was just to accompany a forgotten film. The really great film music was recorded on Decca by Chailly.

We can only speculate how DSCH would have been different had he not lived under the threat of possible death by the Soviets. We'll never know. What is astonishing is just how much great music there is despite living under Stalin's thumb.