Music To Be Seen, Not Heard
SAN JOSE—The composer Aram Khachaturian was in a quandary, which probably explains most of the shortcomings of his grandiose Piano Concerto. In the 1930s composing in the Soviet Union, he was very much under the thumb of the fearsome dictator Stalin, who unfortunately thought himself an outstanding music critic. The pressure to survive and not have to vegetate in the gulags forever led several Soviet composers at that time, including also Shostakovich, to write shallow, flashy music “of the people”…