Shostakovich 5 Symphony

These pre-Chicago recordings of Fritz Reiner with the Pittsburghers is a reminder of his greatness as a conductor. It also restores to the catalog his recordings of some composers he wasn't closely identified with. Shostakovitch, for example, wasn't a regular on Reiner's studio schedule, but should have been, for this Sixth bristles with sardonic wit and energy. The Kodaly Dances, of course, were right up Reiner's alley, and get a smashing performance. The shorter works too, are first class, especially the Bart243;k Hungarian Sketches and another Reiner calling card, Kabalevsky's Colas Breugnon Overture. Weiner's string Divertimento is charming, but the real prize may be Glinka's Kamarinskaya, given a peformance that shimmers and glistens with delicacy and life. Sony's restoration of the 1945-1947 recordings is faultless.

This EMI Angel release Barber & Shostakovich: Violin Concertos places a new package on a time-honored item, the Barber and Dmitry Shostakovich violin concerti as interpreted by violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg with the London Symphony Orchestra led by Maxim Shostakovich. It originally came out in 1992, and the original release, while it was no "Chant," proved a dependable seller. By reducing the price and putting it into a new package, EMI Angel might seem to be hoping to attract buyers who missed it the first time around, but this is a special case in that it is making available again what may have been the finest recording made by Salerno-Sonnenberg under the terms of her EMI contract.

This is a unique collection of audio documents that captured the genius Soviet composers playing for posterity. The major bonus of the set is a 'home-made' recording of the violin sonata performed by the composer and David Oistrakh. The four-hand piano transcription of the Tenth Symphony recorded together with the outstanding composer Mieczysaw Weinberg will also spark an evident interest. Shostakovich recorded concertos, chamber ensembles and vocal cycles with some of the greatest twentieth-century musicians such as Daniil Shafran, Nina Dorliak, Zara Dolukhanova, Alexei Maslennikov, Maxim Shostakovich and the Beethoven Quartet.

The Mahler Chamber Orchestra was Orchestra in Residence at the KlaraFestival 2013 which is known as a modern and international classical music festival far beyond Belgium’s borders. The concerts of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra formed one of the highlights of this year’s festival. Alongside young Greece conductor Teodor Currentzis, who is hailed as an “eccentric super-talented maestro”, the orchestra dedicates its performance to the two composers, contemporaries and friends Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich. The programme includes Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No.1 at whose world premiere in London in 1960 the two composers met for the first time. The orchestra combines one of the most popular cello concertos of the 20th century with Britten’s Sinfonietta and Shostakovich’s Symphony No.1.

The baritone Matthias Goerne, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Mikko Franck launch a trilogy of Shostakovich’s works for baritone and orchestra with a recording of Symphony No.14. This will be followed by Symphony no.13 (Babi Yar) and the Suite on poems by Michelangelo Buonarroti. The soprano Asmik Grigorian joins Matthias Goerne for this monumental yet highly subtle symphony setting poems by García Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker and Rilke.

Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony is an extraordinary work by any standards. It is cast in three movements, with each of the outer two approaching half an hour in duration, astride a shorter central scherzo. Together these occupy a playing time in excess of an hour. There is a huge orchestra, of some 140 players, so the range of timbres and colours is very wide indeed, and the climaxes are overwhelmingly powerful. But more significant than any of these issues is the nature of the music itself, since the development is flexible and remarkably open-ended, veering this way and that, through passages slow and fast, thinly scored and richly powerful. It is a roller-coaster ride for both the musicians and the audience.

The BBC Philharmonic and it's new Chief Conductor, John Storgårds, follow their previous release of Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony with this album of Symphonies Nos 12 and 15. Subtitled 'The Year 1917', the Twelfth Symphony was a project which Shostakovich had been planning and discussing for two decades - a symphony about Lenin. The first movement, 'Revolutionary Petrograd', depicts the arrival of Lenin in Petrograd in April 1917 and his meetings with the working people of the city. The second, 'Razliv', commemorates the site of Lenin's retreat to the north of the city. 'Aurora', the third movement, refers to the Russian battleship the revolutionary mutinous crew of which fired the first shot of the attack on the Winter Palace.