A Far Cry’s democratic programming process is a tribal business; like Survivor, but for classical music. Here’s the story of how one of our more improbable programs came to be.
March 1997: Little Mikey Unterman (age 10) goes to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (with parent) perform Shostakovich’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. He is spellbound and flabbergasted.
mid-2010s: Older Michael Unterman (of ages) remembers that performance, makes internet searches, and finds out that the Mussorgsky inspired Shostakovich’s 14th Symphony, also a song cycle. He listens and decides this is a piece A Far Cry must play, he says it’s: one of the most important pieces for strings (plus two vocal soloists and three percussionists) AFC has yet to undertake.
August 2016: At AFC’s summer retreat, Michael unveils his infamous “Shosty Sandwich,” a program proposal in which the Shostakovich Symphony No. 14 is “sandwiched” between two pieces of Mahler, the Adagietto from his 5th Symphony, both to open and close the concert. He argues that the first Adagietto will open the audience up to the emotional intensity of the Shostakovich, then soothe them back to a hopeful place on the other side. Members of AFC raise concerns that Michael may be playing some kind of prank. The program is voted off the island.
2016-2018: “Shosty Sandwich” languishes in AFC’s programming “Vault.” And yet it nags at the Criers. They open the Vault, only to have their eyes accidentally land upon it. There is a rumbling in their gut.
August 2018: The Criers reach for the “Shosty Sandwich,” but they ask, first, for a taste-test. They worry it might not sit well, after all this time. Brave volunteers convene to listen to the program through from start to finish. Michael feels a little queasy. He worries the format might feel like a tease: the promise of a second Mahler bear hug on the other side of the biting and morbid Shostakovich.
He suggests instead opening with Takemitsu’s Requiem for strings; which teases out the darker tones of the Shostakovich, almost a charcoal darkness, while the Mahler accesses a more emotional and vividly colorful landscape, sort of Klimt-like. The Shostakovich is somewhere in the middle; expressionistic, like Edvard Munch or Max Beckmann.
All three of the pieces orbit the theme of death: the Takemitsu as an elegy to a mentor, the film composer Fumio Hayasaka; and the Mahler, written shortly after a near-death experience that influenced the whole of the 5th Symphony (it opens with an extended funeral march). On the mission of his 14th Symphony, Shostakovich said: “it's useless to protest against death as such, but you can and must protest against violent death,” which his symphony does through poetry by Lorca, Apollinaire, Kuchelbecker, and Rilke.
September 2018: The Criers give the green light.
