Shostakovich

Few new pieces of music in the 20th century have received the kind of celebrity accorded the Shostakovich Symphony No. 7 when it arrived in America. At a time when Russia was seen in a somewhat friendly light by the allied nations, this supposed depiction of the siege of Leningrad was seized upon by the press as a vital cog in the war effort. The composer, clad in military fireman's garb, graced the cover of Time magazine, and Toscanini and Stokowski fought tooth and nail to get the premiere American performance. (Toscanini got his hands on the manuscript first, and Stokowski gave the second performance a few days later.) Here is a Soviet studio recording from the 1950s by Evgeny Mravinsky, the conductor most closely associated with Shostakovich during his lifetime. It is a strong performance with plenty of impact and the Leningrad Philharmonic in good form, and while live Mravinsky versions of several of the symphonies exist in abundance, there are none of the Seventh, making this disc especially valuable.

Even though Dmitry Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1 in F minor was an academic exercise from his teens, and the Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, ("The First of May"), a reflection of the avant-garde experimentation of the early Soviet period, these youthful works reveal salient characteristics of his personality that repeatedly surfaced in the later symphonies and should be considered as fully a part of the cycle. Shostakovich's expressions range from sardonic and brooding moods in the First to the energetic and violent activity of the Third, and these qualities are accurately conveyed in Vasily Petrenko's performances with the Royal Liverpool Orchestra, with the ensemble's choir included in the triumphal finale of the Third. The recordings have a wide audio range, so the extreme dynamics of Shostakovich's music can be heard with minimal adjustment of the volume. That said, much of the music is extremely quiet and eerily thin in texture, so attentive listening is required. But the fortissimos are everything they should be, and Petrenko elicits full sonorities from the orchestra.

In February 2016 the recording took place in the Studio 2 of the Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich. Dina Ugorskaja pursued the finishing process of the master with great impulse and unbelievable energy during all the time when her health abated, even to the point where she selected and approved herself the booklet notes by Tatjana Frumkis. This project will stay simply as a singular milestone, there was a lot planned by the two artists They were also ambivalent toward one another. Prokofiev accused Shostakovich of devouring everything (the fact that the younger composer dared to incorporate the street genres of entertainment music into his classical compositions), and affirmed that Shostakovich had no gift for melody.

If one function of art is to make us ponder difficult questions and thus risk causing offence, there could not be a more potent example than Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony. Setting Babi Yar, Yevtushenko’s blistering denunciation of Soviet antisemitism, in the 1960s was an act of political defiance for the composer. First heard in this country in Liverpool, it is highly appropriate that it forms the conclusion and climax of the RLPO’s riveting Shostakovich cycle. The power this performance accumulates at the climaxes of the second and third movement is lacerating; the men’s choruses may not sound totally Russian, but Alexander Vinogradov is a superb bass soloist, and Vasily Petrenko is as good at gloomy introspection as he is at brittle confrontation.

Trio con Brio Copenhagen returns to Orchid Classics with a triptych of Russian piano trios: two works by Shostakovich framing music by Arensky. These Russian composers lived through turning points in their country’s history. Arensky died in 1906, the year in which Shostakovich was born, and their output charts the trajectory of Russian and Soviet political and artistic history during those years. Arensky’s ardent Piano Trio No.1 was written in 1894, when Russian Romanticism was at its peak. Inspired by young love, the 17-year-old Shostakovich wrote his Piano Trio No.1 Poème in 1923 in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), finding expression for strong personal emotions via a musical language influenced by film scores.

This performance goes right to the top. Not since the amazing mono Ancerl recording has there been a version of this work of such intensity, such expressive urgency, and (yes, believe it or not) such incredible orchestral playing. It’s impossible to praise the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic enough: they put their London colleagues to shame. The cellos and basses have a dark, tactile presence in pianissimo not heard since the old Kondrashin Melodiya recording. The horns play the daylights out of their solos in the first and third movements, while Petrenko has the violins sustaining, articulating, and phrasing the climax of the first movement with a passion and grit that’s beyond praise. Indeed, as an essay in Shostakovich conducting alone this performance deserves an honored place in every collection. Petrenko has the players digging into the second movement with unbridled ferocity at an ideally swift tempo.

Schnittke's Piano Quintet, a creative response to his mother's death, is an austere, haunting work full of grief and tenderness that marks one of his early ventures into polystylistic writing. The opening piano solo is unique, a spare statement of puzzlement in the face of tragedy. It gives way to a waltz, as if recapturing a lost past, then the graceful dance melody literally disintegrates as the strings venture off into other regions, vainly trying to reassemble the theme and failing. At the end of its touching five movements the music's despair is transformed into serene, hard-won acceptance. Shostakovitch's 15th Quartet, his final statement in that form, premiered just months before his death. It's six slow movements are shot through with contemplative sadness and regret. The music is so rich in texture and substance that attention never flags.

Hilary Hahn delights in putting together works that normally don't go together. Her previous pairings of works by Beethoven and Bernstein, Barber and Meyer, and Brahms and Stravinsky went against what most listeners and critics think of as apt disc mates. And in every one so far, Hahn has succeeded: each performance is superb in its own right and each sounds even better in context of the work with which it shares disc space. But not this time. In her new recording of Mendelssohn's E minor and Shostakovich's A minor concertos, Hahn has coupled an astoundingly brilliant performance of the former with a slight and shallow performance of the latter.