Shostakovich 5 Symphony

Recorded in 2001 (Mahler) and 2004 (Shostakovich), this 2007 ECM release provides a wonderful insight into Gidon Kremer's perspective on two composers who are clearly close to his heart. The performances are both fascinating, and the Kremerata Baltica give their not-inconsiderable all in both works.

With one single reservation Haitink's account of Babiy Yar is superb. The reservation is that Marius Rintzler, although he has all the necessary blackness and gravity and is in amply sonforous voice, responds to the anger and the irony and the flaming denunciations of Yevtushenko's text with scarcely a trace of the histrionic fervour they cry out for. The excellent chorus, though, is very expressive and it makes up for a lot, as does the powerful and sustained drama of Haitink's direction.

n 1970, Riccardo Muti conducted the first Western European performance of Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony, a tape of which the composer kept until his death a few years later. This new live recording poignantly reunites work and conductor, who this time leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, bass soloist Alexey Tikhomirov, and male choir—all in electrifying form. Shostakovich’s settings of five poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko—including the opening lament for the 34,000 Jews murdered in 1941 by the Nazis at Babi Yar—are dark and brutal. The remaining four poems, describing human bravery in the face of unimaginable adversity, encapsulate the fear and dread of living under Soviet oppression, and Muti brings a claustrophobic intensity and defiant dignity to Shostakovich’s alternately sardonic and angry music.

Orchestral transcription can be a contentious enterprise, obscuring as it enhances. Yet in rare cases its contours manage to take a shape all their own, living a new life somehow beyond the shadow of the original. Of this transformation we get two fine examples in Dolorosa, a well-conceived program from three distinct compositional minds. The works are presented in chronological order, with a 1967 orchestration of Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 as a “Chamber Symphony” coming first. The arrangement, by conductor and violist Rudolf Barshai (the only one ever approved by the composer), is brilliant in that it avoids masking itself and features a flowing chain of solos.

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 Overture.

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.

John Storgårds and the BBC Philharmonic continue their survey of Shostakovichis late symphonies with this recoding of the 14th, with Elizabeth Atherton and Peter Rose as soloists. Completed in the spring of 1969, and premiered later that year, the symphony is written for soprano, bass and small string orchestra with percussion, setting eleven linked setting of poems by four authors.

John Storgårds and the BBC Philharmonic continue their survey of Shostakovichis late symphonies with this recoding of the 14th, with Elizabeth Atherton and Peter Rose as soloists. Completed in the spring of 1969, and premiered later that year, the symphony is written for soprano, bass and small string orchestra with percussion, setting eleven linked setting of poems by four authors.

This award-winning disc features the prodigious talent of 20-year-old Maxim Vengerov, the clarity of interpretation of 67-year-old Mstislav Rostropovich, and two brilliant concertos by the two greatest Russian composers of the 20th century. Vengerov plays a 1727 "Reynier" Stradivarius violin in both works, and the total effect is wondrous.

The two piano concertos of Shostakovich, though strikingly different from each other, have both become twentieth century classics. The first has long been one of Marc-André Hamelin's 'party pieces.' Hyperion was pleased to have the opportunity to pair him with Andrew Litton, a conductor who knows these works backwards and forwards (he has even recorded the second concerto as pianist). The resulting performances have a vitality and flair which places them amongst the greatest ever put to disc. The Shchedrin concerto, though less well-known, is no less enjoyable. There is brilliance in both the piano writing and the orchestration and the surprise addition of a jazz trio in the finale - including vibraphone and drum kit - is sure to bring the house down.