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Lebrecht, in his handy and engaging resource The Life and Death of Classical Music, argues that Kurt Sanderling, a friend of the composer, was his greatest interpreter: “Facing American orchestras, who knew nothing of the deprivation of Soviet life, he would patiently explain how a tuba wickedly portrays a party apparatchik on his first junket abroad, or a piccolo ironically punctures the arrogance of power” (p. 274).
“Even at that time he could have expressed himself more freely but because of his trauma he spoke of ‘childhood memories’, even of a ‘toy shop’ in the first movement; this is in fact appropriate, but in a quite different, dreadful sense. In this ‘shop’ there are only soulless dead puppets hanging on their strings which do not come to life until the strings are pulled. This first movement is something quite dreadful for me: soullessness composed into music, the emotional emptiness in which people lived under the dictatorship of the time.
Lebrecht:
