Shostakovich Orchetral

This 2 CD set of Shostakovich's Ballet Suites and film music is a treasure. If you have yet to hear the Ballet Suites, do give this a listen. This is Shostakovich at his most genial and witty. Much credit must be given to the man who compiled and arranged these suites: Levon Atovmyan. Atovmyan is the man responsible for not only arranging these ballet Suites. He also arranged most of Shostakovich's film scores into concert suites. As much as I love Shostakovich's original work, these Atovmyan arrangements are even better. Much of the material used in the Ballet Suites was salvaged from one of Shostakovich's most unipsired works, the ballet The Limpid Stream.

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.

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.

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.

String quartet fans will relish this excellent release from ECM. Although the Shostakovich 8th is one of the most over-recorded pieces in the string quartet literature, the performance here is worth having, and is combined with a somewhat familiar but not as widely recorded piece by Webern (for those who might be afraid to listen to anything by Webern, let me assure you that this is a most lovely, lyrical, hauntingly beautiful work, not at all daunting) and a quartet by a composer that will be unfamiliar to most, Emil Burian (1904-1959), whose String Quartet No. 4 is a haunting piece that makes for an attractive finish for this fine CD by the Rosamunde Quartet. The sound quality is rich and radiant in the best ECM tradition.

Wow! This is music making on a cosmic scale. You may hear some jaded critic offer up the following generic comment about this release: "These three players, gathered together for only the second time, naturally can't equal the subtle give and take of more established chamber ensembles." Bull. All three artists rank among the most inspirational and experienced chamber players of our time, and here they set the notes on fire in performances of shattering intensity, improvisational spontaneity, and (in the Tchaikovsky) Herculean grandeur. Argerich's performance of the concerto-like piano part of the Tchaikovsky Trio is especially impressive; she seems to know instinctively when to dominate the proceedings and when to let her partners take over; and the final "Theme and Variations"–a huge movement half an hour in length–seldom has sounded so cohesive and meaningful. As to the Shostakovich, well, what can I say? This is one of the most profoundly moving experiences in music, and how well this trio knows it! The three players find the perfect tempo for the third movement Passacaglia, then build the tragic finale as inexorably as fate itself.

Shostakovich's Symphony No.8 was written in the summer of 1943, and first performed in November of that year by the USSR Symphony Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky, to whom the work is dedicated. Many scholars have ranked it among the composer's finest scores. Some also say Shostakovich intended the work as a ''tragedy to triumph'' symphony, in the tradition of Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler. This release in Praga's Reminiscences series of audiophile SACD remasterings features an historic live recording from 1961 featuring Mravinsky leading the Leningrad Philharmonic.

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.

The "Under Stalin's Shadow" subtitle of this release may be confusing inasmuch as the opening Passacaglia from the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District dates from before the period when Stalin made Shostakovich's life a living hell, and the main attraction, the Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93, was finished ten months after Stalin's death. Actually the album is the first in a set of three; the others will cover the symphonies No. 5 through No. 9, all written during the period of Stalinist cultural control. But even here the theme is relevant: the pieces are linked by a dark mood that carries overtones (of a feminist sort in the case of the opera) of repression. And the Symphony No. 10 is decidedly some kind of turning point, with repeated (and finally triumphant) assertions of the D-S-C-H motif (D, E flat, C, B natural in the German system) that would appear frequently in the composer's later work.

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.