Shostakovich Symphony 10

The good news is this recording of Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony is in the same class as the best ever made. The even better news is it's the start of a projected series of recordings of all the Soviet master's symphonies. Vasily Petrenko has demonstrated before this disc that he is among the most talented of young Russian conductors with superb recordings of Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony and of selected ballet suites. But neither of those recordings can compare with this Eleventh. Paired as before with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Petrenko turns in a full-scale riot of a performance that is yet tightly controlled and cogently argued. Said to depict the failed revolution of 1905, Shostakovich's Eleventh is not often treated with the respect it deserves, except, of course, by Yevgeny Mravinsky, the greatest of Shostakovich conductors whose two accounts have been deemed the most searing on record. Until now: Petrenko respects the composer's score and his intentions by unleashing a performance of staggering immediacy and violence, a virtuoso performance of immense drama, enormous tragedy, and overwhelming power.

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.

Mariss Jansons considers Dmitri Shostakovich to be one of the most serious and sincere composers ever, and finds the fifteen symphonies in particular to be deeply moving and captivating. He sees their music as bearing shattering testimony to a traumatic era of political darkness, while remaining a timeless expression of existential human feeling and experience. Over a period of seventeen years, Mariss Jansons has recorded all the Shostakovich symphonies, on each occasion together with the orchestra he was artistically associated with at the time. Six of the performances were with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks.