Shattering, unforgettable Shostakovich.

An early performer likened the effect of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose to ‘an anarchist’s grenade’, a description that could just as easily be applied to the Fourth Symphony, written eight years later. The latter’s a hugely talented piece and the seedbed for much that was to take hold and germinate in the composer’s later works. But it’s more than that; in the right hands it’s Shostakovich’s most uncompromising and subversive symphony. Remember, the finale of the Fourth was completed in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s infamous Pravda article, with all the personal and artistic turmoil that brought with it.
 
Among the most penetrating versions of this symphony on CD are Kiril Kondrashin’s on Melodiya, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky’s Czech radio broadcast from 1985, Neeme Järvi’s for Chandos and, most recently, Mark Wigglesworth’s for BIS. There’s some dispute about the exact provenance of the Rozhdestvensky, but absolutely no doubt about his excoriating performance. Hard to beat, I thought, until Wigglesworth burst on the scene. In many ways this was the Fourth I’d been waiting for, combining as it does the visceral elements of Rozhdestvensky and Kondrashin with an implacable strength and clarity of vision that’s just astounding. Indeed, it was one of my picks for 2010, and a reading I was sure could not be improved upon.
 
Enter Daniel Raiskin, the up-and-coming maestro from St. Petersburg and, since 2005, the chief conductor of the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie. Lest one is tempted to write off these provincial bands, remember Wigglesworth’s Dutch radio orchestra play Shostakovich as if to the manner born. Factor in a top-notch hybrid recording from BIS and you’ll understand why these newcomers elicited polite interest rather than outright enthusiasm when the disc was offered for review.
 
Well, seconds into the Allegretto and any such doubts are thrust aside by the most lacerating introduction to this symphony I’ve ever encountered. The shrieking strings, chatter of woodwinds and bone-crushing contributions from the percussionists simply beggars belief. It’s not just about heft, for the alarums and excursions that ensue are every bit as gripping, Raiskin extorting exceptional, razor-sharp attack from his players. Wigglesworth is broader and there’s much more air around the notes, but the Russian’s reading – and Avi’s close recording – are alive with detail and arcing with unrelieved electricity.
 
Shostakovich’s strange ditties and diversions are all uncovered with forensic skill, the orchestra responding to this wild music with remarkable assurance. Raiskin never allows the pace to flag and the climaxes – judiciously scaled – are staggering in both breadth and intensity. As for those Mahlerian crescendi, they’ve seldom sounded so menacing, the timps so brutal. One really is in the front row of the stalls here, and there’s no escape from the withering fire. Even Shostakovich’s more spectral writing is as revealing as an x-ray image, the yearning strings most beautifully caught. But it’s Raiskin’s strong, steady pulse that holds all these disparate elements together, the music utterly compelling throughout.
 
And how winningly he phrases the opening of the Moderato. That said, Raiskin brings something of Bartók’s nervous energy – and colour - to the score. There’s a pleasing sense of proportion as well, all those sardonic asides voiced with as much care and attention as the symphony’s more spectacular outbursts. No apologies need be made for the fact that this is a live recording, made over two nights and in different venues; detail is abundant, perspectives are consistent, and the audiences are very quiet indeed.
 
The Largo – Allegro has a pronounced Mahlerian cast, the opening cortege played with splendid character and weight. It’s those gaunt little tunes that bubble up and then subside that give this movement its abiding strangeness, that first peroration as anguished as I’ve ever heard it. This really is a Lubyanka-like edifice of dread and despair, as dark as anything Shostakovich ever wrote, and Raiskin wrings the most individual sonorities from his players. Not only that, he builds tension like few others, that crazed march underpinned by the truly explosive thud of timps and crowned with fevered brass.
 
In a work littered with frigid interludes this movement has more than its fair share of chill-inducing moments, with Shostakovich passing uneasily between cold terror and grim comedy. As for that lampooning brass, it’s superbly managed, the Mahlerian scurry beneath it deftly done. And all the while Raiskin maintains a mesmeric tension, so that when that cataclysm finally arrives it’s been well prepared. Goodness, this is a scream like no other in the symphonic repertoire, the Avi engineers drawing out every last, incandescent detail and decibel. But it’s the haunted postlude that’s really terrifying; this is truly a blasted heath, a no-man’s land of unimaginable bleakness. As compelling as Wigglesworth is at this point, Raiskin distils something quite extraordinary from the notes. The ghostly shimmer of the celesta is indescribably moving.
 
Having emptied the cupboard of superlatives, all I can say is that Daniel Raiskin is a man to watch. Like that anarchist’s ordnance, he’s blown away every shred of smugness and complacency I felt before hearing this phenomenal performance.
 
Shattering, unforgettable Shostakovich.
 
-- Dan Morgan, MusicWeb International

Described by The Strad as presenting “a masterclass in unanimity of musical purpose, in which severity could melt seamlessly into charm, and drama into geniality″, the Carducci Quartet is recognized as one of today’s most successful string quartets. Performing over 90 concerts worldwide each year, the quartet’s upcoming performances of the complete Shostakovich quartets on various concert stages worldwide coincides with this CD, their second Signum release, featuring the composer’s 4th, 8th and 11th quartets.

A modern and visionary work, this ballet, set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich, was created in 1930. It's central theme was the highly moralized battle and triumph of the proletariat against the decadent bourgeoisie, set in europe during the roaring twenties. Surprisingly, the score by Shsotakovich raised political controversies, probably because it borrowed much to European dance forms and consequently, the ballet vanished from the theaters until 1982, when Yuri Grigorovich restaged it with sets by Sion Virsaladze and a completely new libretto mainly revolving around the love story between Rita, a cabaret dancer, and Boris, a young idealist. The conflict in teh original production was also recast as a clash between fishermen - the morally superior workers - and society's criminal elements. To bring back on stage The Golden Age in autumn 2016, a few months prior to Yuri Grigorovich's 90th birthday, was a highly symbolic choice for the Bolshoi Ballet: this work, teh last Grigorovich would ever choreograph for his company, hadn't been staged for almost 10 years. A rare and refined ballet, which ran the risk of falling into oblivion twice, is danced by the new generation of the Bolshoi Ballet, among which Nina Kaptsova et Mikhail Lobukhin.

Shostakovich was no child prodigy - he began piano lessons at nine - but success as a composer came early when his First Symphony, written as a graduation piece, was acclaimed in Leningrad at the premiere in May 1926. That said, there is some fine chamber music in Shostakovich's student output. Much of the Two Pieces for String Octet Op. 11 actually predates the First Symphony Op. 10, remarkably assured for an eighteen year-old. The Two Pieces for String Quartet on the other hand did not surface at all until 1984! Dedicated to the J. Vuillaume Quartet they give us the suggestion of a Shostakovich quartet sound circa 1931 - seven years before the real thing. The original stimulus to compose a piano quintet came from musicians of the Beethoven Quartet who had asked him for something they could all play together. But Shostakovich must have relished the technical challenge of a medium which few twentieth century composers had been prepared to tackle because of it's peculiar problems of balance and texture. The composer himself gave the first performance with the Beethoven Quartet in Moscow on 23 November 1940. And, utterly non-ideological as it was and is, the music won him a Stalin Prize. Shostakovich was one of the most important and prolific writer of string quartets in the 20th century. His String Quartet No. 8 comes from an important period in his personal as well as his artistic life. Musically it comes from the same period as his widely acknowledged masterpiece, the Tenth Symphony. Dissident writers have claimed it represents the composer himself - a lost voice in a cruel world.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Mikhail Pletnev remains a cypher. Remember how rapturously his first major recording as a conductor, Tchaikovsky's Sixth on Virgin, was greeted? Then he went on to do all the symphonies for DG, and the result was the dullest cycle in history. His Beethoven, on the other hand, was simply perverse: not interestingly perverse, but stupidly perverse. Of course this didn't stop equally stupidly perverse critics from praising it, but that's another story altogether.

Now he turns in a very fine Shostakovich 15th. It has something of the balletic grace that made his initial Pathétique so attractive. The lyrical passages in the second movement and the main theme of the finale have a poised beauty that really is quite striking. Similarly, his light textures in the first movement's "toy" music, as well as the scherzo, tickle the ear and keep the music buoyant.

There is a price, of course, in terms of sharpness of focus and power at the climaxes, not to mention emotional intensity. The xylophone and whip don't cut as they might, and the Wagner quotations in the finale lack a certain atmosphere, but the otherworldly textural clarity that Pletnev achieves in the movement's central passacaglia remains very special. In fact, his relative coolness suits this "spacey" music particularly well.

The coupled Hamlet excerpts do not come from the more familiar film score, but comprise a suite taken from the much earlier incidental music. It's typical youthful Shostakovich: pithy, bright, angular, and lots of fun. It requires little beyond sprightly tempos and a literal reading of the notes to make a fine impression, and that's just what the music receives here. PentaTone's sonics are, like the performance, clear, well-balanced, and a touch lacking in body, whether in stereo or multichannel surround formats. A very recommendable disc.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

It is hard to escape the incredible pull of Symphony No. 7, knowing the background to its composition and its general significance. Shostakovich began to work on the actual composition in July 1941 in Leningrad, where he wrote the first three movements under constant attack from the enemy; and after his evacuation from the city besieged by German troops, he completed the Finale and the instrumentation in Kuibyschev in December 1941.

Reviews:

Paavo Järvi's Leningrad is the opposite of his father's 1988 epic with the Scottish National Orchestra - light, laconic and sonically lean where Neeme's recording was spectacularly big in every way.

– BBC Music Magazine

Järvi and his engineers offer ruthless clarity and precision, exposing a rogue E flat clarinet with a flash of the theme at one point (never heard that before) and lacerating flutter-tongued trumpets as the shock and awe peaks…there is no denying the excellence of the playing.

– Gramophone