Shostakovich Sanderling

Kurt Sanderling (1912–2011), born in Prussia, fled Germany for the USSR on the invitation of his Jewish relatives living there, to seek artistic and personal refuge from the Nazi regime.

Karl Weigl’s music demonstrates once again that the great Austrian/German symphonic tradition did not die with Mahler, but continued to thrive well into the 20th century. Weigl (1881-1949) worked under Mahler in Vienna and enjoyed a fine reputation until, as we’ve heard often by now, the Nazi seizure of power, which forced his emigration to America where he died in comparative obscurity. He nevertheless composed a substantial body of orchestral and chamber music, including six symphonies. If this one is typical, it’s a legacy that urgently calls out for wider exposure. Composed in 1945 and dedicated to the memory of President Roosevelt, the “Apocalyptic Symphony” received its premiere in 1968 under Stokowski.

An early entry in Bernard Haitink’s Shostakovich cycle, this winning performance of the Fifteenth Symphony promised much for what was eventually to become a series greatly varied in quality and inspiration. It may be asking too much for a Western conductor to perform all of these symphonies with the same intensity and passion as might be shown by any of several Soviet counterparts, who were, after all, living and working under the same system that had so oppressed and threatened the composer. As for Symphony No. 15, its lesser degree of brutality than most of its predecessors makes it a good match for Haitink’s tidy conducting style.

Is Gerald Finley today’s Fischer-Dieskau? I don’t mean to suggest that their voices sound alike or that they share an interpretive perspective. But like his predecessor, Finley is comfortable in opera, oratorio, and song; his repertoire stretches from the Baroque period through Schubert and Wagner to the present; his sense of musical phrase is unfailing; he’s got a sensitivity to literary nuance, coupled with a clarity of enunciation, that few singers can match; and most important of all, his interpretations, for all their emotional immediacy, are marked by an astonishing level of intellect and care. He’s heard in peak form on this new release.

Beethoven’s final symphony was also the first in the history of music to go beyond the scope of purely instrumental music and open itself up to the human voice. Conceived in several stages between 1817 and 1824, his D minor Symphony op.125 enlists the services of a choir and four vocal soloists in its final movement, effectively becoming a cantata. With its setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy from 1785, it conjures up a dream of humans coexisting in peace – assuming that foes can become brothers. Beethoven’s own contemporaries believed that his Ninth Symphony represented the ne plus ultra of symphonic music and that the genre’s traditional parameters had been definitively exhausted with this work, whereas in fact the Ninth marks the beginning of a new symphonic age, providing the impetus for a whole series of unorthodox successors from Berlioz and Liszt to Mahler and Shostakovich.