Leckeres Aus Omas Küche No 32 im April 2013

Valery Gergiev continues his Shostakovich symphony cycle with the release of the Eighth Symphony. The work, imbued with a deep sense of sorrow and fear, is considered to be one of the composer’s finest scores. The authorities expected a victorious anthem in light of the Nazi retreat, but Shostakovich appeared too affected by the casualties and ruin of the war.

For his third recording on Naïve / Ambroisie, and following an extremely successful Rachmaninov sonatas recording, Nikolai Lugansky pairs with one of the most refined conductors, Kent Nagano (with whom he already recorded several successful discs) and the excellent DSO-Berlin to perform brilliant, breathtaking performances of the virtuoso Grieg and Prokofiev Piano Concertos.

The main work on the present disc is the Second Symphony – a darkly hued, powerful work lasting almost an hour. The composer apparently planned to dedicate it to King Edward VII as ‘a loyal tribute’, but the monarch’s sudden death in May 1910, led to the symphony being inscribed instead to his memory. Composed during the same years as the symphony, the two companion pieces on the disc also have a melancholy tinge: Elegy for strings, and Sospiri (‘sighs’) for strings, harp and organ.

Gabriel Fauré’s musical language bridges a gap between the romanticism of the 19th century and the new worlds of music which appeared in the 20th, employing subtle harmonic changes and a gift for melody to combine innovation with an entirely personal idiom. His First Piano Quartet is filled with characteristic French colour and lyricism, and the Piano Trio in D minor is a late work whose musical language is familiar from his songs. Both the Pavane and the popular Sicilienne express nostalgia for earlier times, and the short Pièce has great simplicity and charm.