Jansons stressed, this is “my method for all,” whether conducting Beethoven, Shostakovich or Bartok. To his credit, Jansons combined approaching music on a high intellectual level with an ...

“Good pianist.” I ask Jansons to tell us some Shostakovich stories, too. Shostakovich was an anxious, guarded man, says Jansons. He mumbled. He liked two things a lot: soccer and women.

Dmitri Shostakovich might have been an introverted, and sometimes troubled composer, but when he was still in his mid-20s, he wrote a Concerto for Piano and Trumpet that's filled with wit and joy ...

The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra is said to be the bee's knees among orchestras, the cream of the crop. Mariss Jansons brings the band to North America for people between Chapel Hill and ...

A story about Shostakovich, related by Mariss Jansons.On the homepage today, I have a piece about a great musician, Mariss Jansons. A conductor from Latvia, he died in recent weeks. In the last ...

Maestro Jansons's recording of the Shostakovich symphonic cycle, completed in 2005 with several orchestras, including the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, is considered a standard among recent ...

Jansons was, in fact, born in Latvia in 1943, at a time when it was occupied by the Germans and would soon be reclaimed by the Russians who marched back in the spring of 1944 to stay for 45 years.

Jansons grew up in the Soviet Union – first in Riga, Latvia, where he was born in 1943, and later in Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg, as it was known when Shostakovich was born there.

Jansons would have us understand Shostakovich’s subtitle-“a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism”-as a subliminal mockery of his Stalinist oppressors disguised as a gesture of creative ...