Shaporin

This is an exceptionally accomplished debut recording from cellist Laura van der Heijden, winner of BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2012. It includes Soviet composers’ irritated and defiant responses to the Communist regime’s 1948 decree on what they could write. Prokofiev’s 1949 Sonata is a blistering, angry work, performed here with passion and guts. Myaskovsky’s 1948 Sonata, which, ironically, went on to win the Stalin Prize, harks back to the Romantic age—the richness and depth of van der Heijden’s tone is a thing to behold. The final, melancholy Lyadov Prelude is an aching portrait of Russian despair.

The conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky was never a predictable artist on disc and his hottest performances could easily power the national grid. Such is the intensity of at least two Shostakovich performances that turn up in Brilliant Classics’s Gennady Rozhdestvensky Edition. I cannot recall ever hearing a more confrontational account of the Ninth Symphony than the one Rozhdestvensky gave with the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra on December 21, 1982, the work’s cheerful, rather sardonic “not-a-ninth-symphony” spirit suddenly pushed to the edges of irony and at times sounding positively sadistic, the first and last movements in particular. A very extreme case of “what he really meant”, whether or not you agree.

While this collection brings together all the standard tunes Mstislav Rostropovich recorded for EMI Classics, the "Russian" recordings are deservedly the headline grabbers. World premieres abound, from a searing account of Prokofiev's Cello Sonata with Sviatoslav Richter to an especially probing Shostakovich Second Cello Concerto, both given in the presence of the composers.

Following the 2017 complete edition released for the 10th anniversary of Rostropovich’s death, the greatest cellist of his time is now part of the 100 Best Series. These new compilations take the best of his recordings for Warner Classics as a cellist in the 2017 Remastering and also as a conductor.