Dimitri Shostakovich / Parade

On this day in classical music: Dimitri Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 10” received its premiere in 1953 with Yevgeny Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic. In 1948, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khachaturian, among others, were denounced for writing inappropriate and formalist music. The Tenth Symphony was Shostakovich’s first symphonic work since his denunciation in 1948. The composer made use of a melodic motif based on the notes D, E-Flat, C, B, a musical cryptogram that outlines a portion of the composer’s name in a German transliteration: Dmitri Schostakovich. A program note written for a performance of the Tenth Symphony by the Los Angeles Philharmonic called the work “48 minutes of tragedy, despair, terror, and violence and two minutes of triumph.” Listen to Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela perform the second movement Allegro of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZbJOE9zNjw

On this day in the musical theatre: “Parade” opened on Broadway in 1998. With a book by Alfred Uhry and a score by Jason Robert Brown, this fact-based musical told the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager who was accused of raping and murdering 13-year old factory employee Mary Phagan. Frank’s trial was sensationalized by the media and aroused antisemitic tensions in pre-World War I Atlanta. Frank’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison but a lynch party kidnapped him and hanged him from an oak tree in Phagan’s hometown of Marietta. Uhry had personal knowledge of the Frank story as his great-uncle owned the pencil factory run by Leo Frank. Directed by Hal Prince, “Parade” only had a 10-week run but won Tony Awards for Uhry’s book and Brown’s score. Listen to Brent Carver (Leo Frank) and Carolee Carmello (Lucille Frank) perform “This Is Not Over Yet” and “The Old Red Hills of Home” on the 1999 Tony Awards broadcast. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr_mbN0iLX8

Musical musings: The tree is a sermon in itself. A big, sturdy oak with serpentine limbs, it’s the first thing the audience sees in “Parade,” the solemn, high-reaching new musical directed by Harold Prince that opened last night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. The oak’s branches glow, in sinister abstraction, through a scrim before a single note is sung, and it will be a dominant presence throughout the evening, casting a metaphoric shadow that is both premonitory and admonitory. A man, a good man, will be hanged from that tree before “Parade” is over. It is the image of a brutally unfair fate awaiting its victim, and we are never, ever allowed to forget what it signifies. Not that we would have anyway. One thing “Parade” cannot be accused of is fuzziness of focus. Inspired by the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched in Marietta, Ga., in 1915 for the murder of a 13-year-old girl, this musical provides a painstakingly rendered chart of the wheels of injustice. And it never lets up in its insistence on the innocence, on several levels, of its protagonist and the moral blindness and corruption of his persecutors. That the result is often more podium-thumping screed than compelling story is in itself a heartbreaker. “Parade” prompted raised eyebrows and arch jokes (have you heard the one about the dancing lynch mob?) long before it went into previews, and the involvement of Livent Inc., the financially ailing Canadian-based theatrical company, as one of its producers only added to the air of gallows humor. The death of Leo Frank may be an unlikely subject for a musical, but that is not what sabotages “Parade.” Musicals can be grim and even grotesque as long as they let you feel their heartbeat, the pulse that animates the behavior onstage. You need only think of “Sweeney Todd,” which drew its audience into improbable identification with its crazed, murderous title character. In this sense, the odds are comparatively in favor of “Parade.” It arrives with an innately sympathetic hero, undoubtedly worthy of our tears. But for those tears to flow, we have to get to know Leo Frank as a man, not a symbol. The civics lesson that is “Parade” forbids our ever approaching such knowledge. – Ben Brantley in The New York Times

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