The noise of time / Julian Barnes.

Patron comment on 02/10/2018

The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes (2016 ) Historical Fictional Biography A fact-based account of the Soviet-Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich’s life. Well written as one would expect from an author of Julian Barnes’s stature. The book is informative and its main strength is in an exploration of the moral conflict that Shostakovich faced in confronting and complying with the demands of the Soviet authorities. I think personally it is weak in its exploration of how this struggle affected the music Shostakovich wrote. The book does generalize on the irony in Shostakovich’s music as he tried appease the demands of the authorities for patriotic works pleasing to the masses while at the same time adding avantgarde movements that broke new ground or elements that may have been considered subversive, but it is really somewhat vague on this. Also, Barnes missed incorporating into his novel one of the most uplifting stories of the Second World War, a story that would have given the novel more life, that of the few surviving and starved members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra in their struggle to perform of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony (The Leningrad Symphony) towards the end of the city’s siege, the siege that resulted in more deaths than any other single conflict in the war. Here are a couple of references for anyone that may be interested in Shostakovich beyond Barnes’s novel: A good short BBC Radio podcast on the Leningrad Radio Orchestra’s performance - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0329kkl The aspect of irony in Shostakovich’s music is explored in-depth in an on-line lecture and performance offered by Gresham College https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/irony-in-music-from-the-soviet-union