Shostakovich on NBC

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1938, radio listeners across North America tuned to the NBC network to hear the first American performance of the Symphony No. 5 by 32-year-old Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. The work premiered in Moscow the previous year to great acclaim, and many American conductors and orchestras were competing to give its first performance here, but it was Artur Rodzinski and the NBC Symphony who were chosen — for two very good reasons.

First, he had traveled to Moscow in 1934 to meet Shostakovich and a kind of mutual admiration bond was formed. Second, NBC was willing to pay the outrageously high premium demanded by the Soviet government for the American premiere. Now, $5000 might not seem like a lot to us now, but in 1938 that was the equivalent of well over $100,000 in today’s money — and NBC was willing and able to pony up that much to promote their recently-formed NBC Symphony Orchestra and its coast-to-coast radio broadcasts.

Rodzinski’s wife Halina recalled that upon receiving the new score after all the fuss and expense, her husband was at first not impressed, but during rehearsals fell in love with what would become Shostakovich’s most-performed symphony.

Music Played in Today's Program

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Symphony No. 5; Cleveland Orchestra; Artur Rodzinski, conductor; Sony 19439928772

On This Day

Births

• 1717 - Austrian composer Georg Matthias Monn, in Vienna

• 1846 - Italian-born British composer and vocal teacher Sir Francesco Paolo Tosti, in Ortona

• 1887 - American composer Florence Price, in Little Rock, Arkansas

• 1906 - Hungarian-born American composer and conductor Antal Dorati, in Budapest

• 1935 - Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen, in Salmi

Deaths

• 1933 - German composer and organist Sigfrid Karg-Elert, 55, in Leipzig

• 1960 - Australian composer and pianist Arthur Benjamin, 66, in London

Premieres

• 1903 - Frederick S. Converse: Endymion’s Narrative for orchestra, by the Boston Symphony, Wilhelm Gericke conducting

• 1916 - de Falla: Nights in the Gardens of Spain for piano and orchestra, in Madrid

• 1920 - Stenhammar: incidental music for Shakespeare’s As You Like It, at the Lorensberg Theater in Gothenburg, Sweden

• 1926 - Varèse: Amériques, by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting

• 1942 - Stravinsky: Circus Polka at Madison Square Gardens in New York, by the Barnum & Bailey Circus, with M. Evans conducting

• 1948 - Barber: song-cycle Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for voice and orchestra, by the Boston Symphony with Serge Koussevitzky conducting and soprano Eleanor Steber the soloist

• 1959 - Benjamin Lees: Prologue, Capriccio and Epilogue for orchestra, in Portland, Oregon

• 1967 - Ned Rorem: Water Music for clarinet, violin and orchestra, by the Youth Chamber Orchestra of Oakland, with Robert Hughes conducting and Larry London (clarinet) and Thomas Halpin (violin) the soloists

Others

• 1870 - Grieg writes a letter from Rome describing how Franz Liszt performed his Piano Concerto at sight and praised the work highly

• 1938 - American premiere of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 by the NBC Symphony, Artur Rodzinski conducting

• 1939 - First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt sponsors an Easter Sunday concert by Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial to protest racial discrimination after the singer is denied use of Washington's Constitution Hall (owned and administered by the Daughters of the American Revolution). Some 75,000 people attend this open-air event.