Dr Elphick was a guest expert speaking during the interval live on BBC Radio 3, discussing Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony.
Dr Dan Elphick, Associate Professor in Musicology and new Head of Music, spoke with Tom Service about the contexts and song quotations in Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony. The symphony was then performed afterwards by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Thomas Søndergård.
Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony, ’The Year 1905’ depicts the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in January 1905, when Tsarist troops fired on a crowd of peaceful protestors in St Petersburg, prompting the full-scale revolution that shook Russia and challenged Tsarist power to its limits. Dan discussed with presenter Tom Service how the symphony is filled with quotations of contemporaneous songs, including prison and revolutionary songs, and some self-quotation from Shostakovich himself, to depict the tumultuous events.
You can listen to the full concert at BBC Sounds here (the interval discussion segment begins just after 42:00): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002zcx8
About Dr Elphick
Dr Dan Elphick is Associate Professor in Musicology and Head of Music at Royal Holloway, specialising in music from Russia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. Dan is a convenor of the Slavonic and East European Music study group for the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES), a fellow of the Centre for Russian Music at Goldsmiths, and a member of the editorial board for DSCH, the Shostakovich Journal. Dan is also a member of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway. Dan’s teaching at Royal Holloway includes the modules ‘Russian Music, Literature, and Film’, and ’The String Quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich’.
