‘He Was a Creator; I Am an Interpreter’

Conductor Maxim Shostakovich has happy memories of his father, Dmitri Shostakovich, but unhappy memories of the persecutions against the great Soviet composer.

“When I was a small guy, 10 years old, I remember being in our country house where my father worked,” said the younger Shostakovich, 61. “People walked around our house screaming, ‘Formalist! Show your face!’

“Every day in the newspapers, they read ugly articles about him. I made a [slingshot] and tried to protect my father when I was small.”

He’s still protecting him--these days, mostly with a baton.

Shostakovich will conduct the Pacific Symphony in his father’s Tenth Symphony tonight and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

“It was always like this,” he recalled in a telephone interview from a friend’s home in Sherman Oaks. “In 1936, they attacked ‘Lady Macbeth.’ Then after the war years, things were a little bit better. The Seventh Symphony [‘Leningrad’] was in favor. Then in 1948, he was denounced again, and things went down. All his works were prohibited. He was out of favor. Music teachers in the conservatory described him as ‘an enemy of the people,’ etc., etc.

“It happened over and over for every one of my father’s works. When he finished a new symphony, he wasn’t sure if it would be prohibited or not.”

Indeed, the 1948 attack was so bitter that Shostakovich would let five years go by before writing his next major work, his Tenth Symphony, which premiered Dec. 17, 1953, about nine months after Stalin’s death.

Yet this same composer was awarded the Order of Lenin--the nation’s highest civilian award--twice, and the Stalin Prize twice. He was secretary of the USSR Composers’ Union for eight years in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, when he also became a member of the Supreme Soviet. In 1966, he received the title Hero of Socialist Labor, the first composer to be so honored.

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For all that, Shostakovich remembers the composer as a warm and loving parent.

“He was a great father,” he said. “He was always with his children, with his wife. I remember if, for example, lunch was exactly at 2 o’clock, even if my father was composing something very important, he would be very punctual at the table.

“He was very normal. People think he was like composers are sometimes portrayed in movies--that artists are a little bit crazy and foolish.”

And his father nurtured Maxim’s interest in music. “He encouraged me. Father taught me directly at first. He started to teach my sister, then myself. He composed small pieces for us which got more and more difficult. For piano.

“He was my great teacher. His opinions about performances were priceless. He discussed after a concert how a conductor or some pianist performed some music. Not only his music. Brahms, Beethoven, Stravinsky. His opinions were absolutely great. They formed my musical taste. I started to understand what’s good and what’s bad in general.”

Did the lessons end after he grew up?

“He taught me all my life!”

Unlike his father, Maxim Shostakovich says he has never felt the desire to compose.

“He was always a creator; I am an interpreter.”

Maxim Shostakovich studied piano and conducting at the Moscow Conservatory and became assistant conductor of the Moscow Symphony in 1963. He also began conducting in Europe and the United States. Then in 1981, during a tour in West Germany with the USSR State Radio Orchestra, he and his son, also named Dmitri, defected to the West. Leonid Brezhnev was in power. The Soviet press roundly denounced him as a traitor to his father’s legacy.

“I chose freedom,” Maxim said simply. “At that time, it seemed to all of us that this regime [would be] endless. We left Russia. It was our type of protest against this power. A lot of people left--artists, musicians. We received the possibility of talking openly about what happened in our homeland.”

The conductor and his son are American citizens now. But his love for his homeland did not disappear. He returned in 1994 and now lives in St. Petersburg, the city of his birth.

“I spend a lot of time in Russia now because my children study in the schools [there], which is very important,” he said.

“I would like them to possess a good education, a Russian education, and the Russian language. If you would like to do these things, you need to spend a lot of time in the country.

“I conduct in Russia a lot now. In St. Petersburg, there’s a symphony by the name of Shostakovich. I feel it’s a kind of duty to visit and conduct this orchestra.”

The orchestra is the St. Petersburg Academic Symphony, also known as the St. Petersburg Shostakovich Philharmonic.

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Although his father never would talk about his music before it was finished and even when he did “would talk about normal musical things, such as tempos,” Maxim Shostakovich said, others have found significant political meaning in his works.

The Tenth Symphony, for instance, according to Solomon Volkov’s controversial book “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich,” is supposed to contain a hidden musical portrait of Stalin.

Maxim Shostakovich dismissed that as one of the “rumors” in the Volkov book.

“I think some musicologists set this idea forth,” he said. “Others repeated it. I don’t think of it that way. Father never said it was a portrait of Stalin.”

That the Tenth Symphony is an especially personal work, however, is obvious since Dmitri Shostakovich introduces a musical acronym of his name in it, as Bach did with his own name in “Die Kunst der Fuge.”

The letters “DSCH” become, in German, the musical notes D, E-flat, C and B, which become a prominent theme in the third and fourth movements of the Tenth and actually in other later works as well.

Maxim Shostakovich won’t discuss any hidden political meanings in his father’s music.

“I never explain music,” he said. “If I did, I couldn’t conduct. What I can say is the beginning [of the Tenth] is slow and soft, then it gets loud and fast. I couldn’t explain music further. I’m not a musicologist. I can only conduct. I’m not a writer.”

And it has no hidden political content?

“The most important thing,” he advised, “is just to listen to the music.”

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* Maxim Shostakovich will conduct the Pacific Symphony in his father’s Tenth Symphony today and Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Also on the program: the Overture to Weber’s “Euryanthe” and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, with soloist Helene Grimaud. $17-$48. (714) 556-2787.