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.

Classical Music

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Featuring Anastasia Yatsenko, Andrei Merkuriev, Denis Savin, Morikhiro Iwata, Pavel Sorokin.

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

Alpha is now reissuing three recordings from its back catalogue, the first album is of the conductor Teodor Currentzis. An opportunity to discover or rediscover three very different styles, and three facets of the talen tof ''the enfant terrible of classical music'', as Le Figaro called him, for whom ''music is intended to transport into the waking world the sentiments we feel when we dream''. With their invitation to travel through different periods and territories, these reissues may be appreciated both separately and as a triptych revealing the artistic approach of Teodor Currentzis and his ensemble MusicAeterna, from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas to Shostakovich's Symphony No. 14 by way of Mozart's Requiem, the Salzburg composer's last work, here given an invigorating reinterpretation.

'The majority of my symphonies are tombstones' - these words by Shostakovich are quoted by conductor Mark Wigglesworth in the liner notes to his fifth disc of Shostakovich's Symphonies on BIS. Symphony No. 13, subtitled 'Babi Yar', is a case in point. Shostakovich explicitly stated that he wanted the Symphony - and in particular it's first movement - to be a monument over the 100.000 Jews slaughtered at a ravine called Babi Yar outside of Kiev in 1941. Not just a monument, however: the Symphony was also intended as an indictment against the anti-Semitism that had been brought to its height during the Nazi era, but which also flourished in post-war Soviet Union, with the result that Babi Yar and other atrocities were kept secret by the authorities. This silence was deeply upsetting to Shostakovich, and when he read Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem Babi Yar, he decided to set it to music. 'I cannot not write it!', he said to a friend. Shostakovich had originally only intended to set this one poem by Yevtushenko, but deciding to create a larger-scaled work he chose four more texts for what was to become a symphony in five movements. As Mark Wigglesworth writes, these poems 'reveal a huge kaleidoscope of Russian events, emotions and ideas.' In the realization of this kaleidoscope, Wigglesworth has the support of bass soloist Jan-Hendrik Rootering, the men of the Netherlands Radio Choir, and - of course - the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, with which the previous instalment in this series, Symphony No. 8 (BIS-SACD-1483), was recorded, to critical acclaim. The reviewer of BBC Music Magazine put it in the following way: 'Mark Wigglesworth ... stretches the playing of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic to its very impressive limits and remains the finest Shostakovich interpreter of his generation', describing the result as 'a performance which always gives us the full measure of this traumatic masterpiece.'

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

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

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

SYMPHONY NO. 8 IN C MINOR, OP.

The spirit of Gustav Mahler looms over the pages of Shostakovich’s turbulent, sprawling and enigmatic Symphony No. 4, a work so uncompromising that for many years he suppressed its performance, fearing public censure. Mixing bombast with banality, savagery with sarcasm, this baffling yet profound work is also one of his most startlingly original. It’s paired with his ever popular Symphony No. 10, a brooding and lyrical masterpiece which is said to contain a musical portrait of Joseph Stalin in the impetuous second movement and in whose third and fourth movements Shostakovich artfully weaves a musical motif based on his own name which emerges resplendent in the spirited finale. This triumphant release is the latest in a series of recordings for Pentatone by the Russian National Orchestra. Their Shostakovich cycle was widely acclaimed as “the most exciting cycle of the Shostakovich symphonies to be put down…and easily the best recorded.” (SACD.net). The Symphony No. 7, conducted by Paavo Järvi, won the Diapason d’Or de l’annee 2015 and was nominated for a 2016 Grammy Award for Best Suurpund Sound recording.

Gustavo Gimeno conducts the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg in a fascinating survey of confident, assured and striking orchestral works by the young Shostakovich. This new recording from Pentatone includes his breathtaking Symphony No. 1 Op. 10 - the student work which brought Shostakovich international fame. While indebted to the Russian masters, Shostakovich's early works nevertheless demonstrate his precocious brilliance, originality and falir and they offer an intriguing glimpse at the evolution of his distinctive, mature style. From the easy going and good humored Scherzo Op. 1, the Tchaikovskian Theme and Variations in B-flat major Op. 3, or the Stravinskyan Scherzo Op. 7, his youthful vitality is never in doubt. But with his Symphony No 1 Op. 10 he produced his first masterpiece and found his own distinctive voice. It's a thrilling work full of sardonic edginess, pained introspection and dramatic outbursts, and closes with a barnstorming finale. Composed 10 years later, the aptly titled Five Fragments for orchestra Op. 42 are short, pungent and austere pieces; the arresting style is modernist but the sound is unmistakeably Shostakovich. Following his acclaimed conducting debut with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2014, Gustavo Gimeno took up the post of Music Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg with the 2015-2016 season. An auspicious collaboration with Pentatone followed in 2016 and three releases with the orchestra are planned in 2017. "His musical rhetorics are refined, his grip on the structure of the compositions is accurate and convincint" observed Joep Stapel in the NRC Handelsblad, "Gimeno knew how to keep the tension and made the musicians...excel." Elsewhere in a busy international schedule, Gimeno has debuted with major orchestras in Europe and America, and toured with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra to Taiwan and Japan.

SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartets Nos. 13, 14, 15. SCHNITTKE String Quartet No. 3 • Pacifica Qrt • CEDILLE 145 (2 CDs: 104:28)

With this fourth volume, the Pacifica Quartet brings its survey of Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets to a close. As with the each of the earlier two-disc sets, a bonus is offered in the form of a string quartet by one of Shostakovich’s contemporaries, this time the String Quartet No. 3 by Alfred Schnittke. Previous discmates were Myaskovsky, Prokofiev, and Weinberg.

Between two hospitalizations in 1970, Shostakovich managed to complete his 13th Quartet in August of that year. Alone among the composer’s 15 quartets, this Bb-Minor work is in a single movement and exhibits a palindromic form—ABCBA. Like the 12th Quartet before it, this one, too, is based on a tone row encompassing all 12 semitones of the chromatic scale. Shostakovich’s endgame, however, is to confirm tonality rather than to deny it.

Much of the composer’s music seems to dwell in dark, brooding, baleful places—that’s nothing new—but this 13th Quartet arguably surpasses in mood and atmosphere even the spectral chill and ghoulish humor of his earlier works. It unmasks the face of death, and it’s a visage so hideous to behold that gazing upon it will freeze your eyeballs in their sockets. I can only describe the Pacifica Quartet’s reading of the score by saying it achieves a sub-zero degree of cold that can penetrate and shatter your bones. Never have I heard such a graphic representation in music of the daemon Thanatos, not by the Fitzwilliam, Emerson, St. Petersburg, Brodsky, or Alexander String Quartets. This is scary stuff.

Shostakovich’s next quartet, No. 14 in F# Minor, reverts back to a key more convenient for string players, three sharps, allowing for the use of some open strings, and being a lot easier to finger than the five flats of the previous quartet. The composer began work on the piece in 1972, but took time off for a trip to Ireland and England, where he visited his friend, Benjamin Britten, in Aldeburgh. That delayed completion of the Quartet until the following spring, after Shostakovich had returned to Moscow.

The score is dedicated to Sergei Shirinsky, the original cellist of the Beethoven Quartet, and contains a cryptogram in the third movement on “Seryozha,” a familiar or affectionate form of address for Sergei. However, the pitches—D#-E-D-E-G-A—make no sense unless transliterated into their Cyrillic equivalents. The “E,” for example, represents the Cyrillic letter “ë,” which I’m given to understand is pronounced “yo,” thereby denoting the second syllable in “Seryozha.”

Compared to the 13th Quartet, No. 14 is positively playful. Still, being by Shostakovich, the music does have its bleak and menacing moments, but also one passage in particular in the third movement, beginning at 4:49 in this performance that’s of utterly aching beauty. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the score, but if my ears don’t deceive me, it sounds like the viola playing in double stops for a number of bars, accompanied by gentle pizzicatos in the violins. If I’m right, and it is the viola, then Masumi Per Rostad’s playing at this point is simply breathtaking; which is not to take anything away from Simin Ganatra, Sibbi Bernhardsson, and Brandon Vamos, whose playing throughout this entire series has been nothing but phenomenal.

Shostakovich’s last quartet, No. 15, is clearly a valedictory work in much the same way that Beethoven’s final quartets are. Completed in May 1974, a year and three months before his death, Shostakovich chose for this score what Stephen Harris calls “the mysterious but traditionally morbid key of Eb Minor.” “Morbid” may be one word for it, but with a key signature of six flats most string players would call it by a word or words not to be spoken in polite company. Had Shostakovich lived to write a 16th quartet, one can only wonder if he’d have upped the ante to seven flats with a score in Ab Minor or Cb Major.

In six movements, the 15th Quartet is the composer’s longest, playing for some 36 minutes in the Pacifica’s performance. Moreover, each of the six movements is in the same Eb-Minor key and in one degree or another of Adagio . As quoted by Elizabeth Wilson in Shostakovich: A Life Remembered , the composer himself gave this performance instruction: “Play the first movement so that flies drop dead in mid-air and the audience leaves the hall out of sheer boredom.”

The music obviously speaks of facing death, but it’s not macabre and malignant like the 13th Quartet; rather, it’s mostly melancholy, sorrowful, and resigned, with the occasional defiant outburst. If I singled out violist Rostad for his playing in the 14th Quartet, I have to note first violinist Simin Ganatra’s superb execution of the third-movement cadenza in the 15th Quartet.

Shostakovich’s string quartets have been extremely fortunate from the very beginning to have received quite a few outstanding recordings. A number of them are cited above, but there are earlier ones by the Beethoven and Borodin Quartets that have historical significance, as well as more recent ones by the Sorrel and Mandelring Quartets (the last two of which I’ve not heard). But of those I have heard—and that would include all the others named in this review—I believe I’m prepared to say that this cycle by the Pacifica Quartet is the top contender. Whether you already have one or more Shostakovich quartet cycles in your collection, or you have none, the Pacifica’s is a must-have for anyone of the conviction that these are the most profound musical utterances in the realm of the string quartet since Beethoven.

Disc two closes with a performance of Alfred Schnittke’s String Quartet No. 3, composed in 1983. Seth Brodsky, assistant professor of music and the humanities at the University of Chicago (no connection to the Brodsky Quartet), notes Schnittke’s “anti-classical” or “polystylistic” approach, which “depends on shattering classical norms of balance, purity, and wholeness for a multiplicity of styles.” “Schnittke’s Third Quartet,” Brodsky continues, “shatters all three within its first minute. We hear only broken pieces from other times and other works—first from Orlando de Lassus’s Stabat Mater (later 1500s), then from Beethoven‘s Grosse Fuge (1825), and finally from Shostakovich‘s famous ‘musical signature,’ ‘D-S-C-H,’ first used in his Fifth String Quartet of 1952. Schnittke takes these three musical modules, from disparate traditions traversing half a millennium, and puts them directly after one another, only to have the whole thread snap and fall to the ground.”

As works by Schnittke go—at least among those I can claim to have heard—this Third Quartet is fairly accessible, an impression borne out by its relative popularity. Not counting the present version by the Pacifica Quartet, the work has received six recordings, one of which, with the Borodin Quartet on a Virgin Classics CD, to my surprise, I found on the shelf and dusted off for comparison. Once again, for playing of arresting graphic detail, the Pacifica wins hands-down.

This is a Shostakovich cycle for the ages.

FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Shostakovich String Quartets 7, 8, and 9 are right in the middle of his output in the genre. This recording by the Brodsky String Quartet is more lyrical and relaxed than many interpretations of the same pieces.

Classical Music

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

Classical Music

This recording is billed as the first totally, absolutely complete release of The Golden Age, Shostakovich's best ballet, in that you get all of the repeats, some of which are omitted in the only competing, more or less complete version on Chandos (with Rozhdestvensky). Having all of the repeats isn't necessarily a good thing, but with Serebrier and his Scottish players we are in good hands. Rozhdestvensky's recording also is very good, but his Swedish orchestra isn't any better than the Royal Scottish National--and it also suffers from some minor moments of scruffy rhythm in the strings. More to the point, the Russian conductor's reading isn't entirely free of the heaviness that often characterizes his conducting.


You can hear this quite clearly in comparing the two interpretations of the splendid Can-can in Act 3, one of the largest and most powerful extended numbers in the ballet. Serebrier actually is the slower of the two, by a few unimportant seconds, but his rhythms cut through more crisply, and the orchestra's brighter-toned brass and more vivid percussion make the music sparkle as it should--and terrify when it must (as at the end of this very piece). Otherwise there's little to choose between the two, but much else to enjoy here, including that splendidly romantic Dance of the Diva (a big Adagio) as well as all of the other numbers familiar from the popular suite extracted by the composer at the time of the original production. Terrific sound and a very reasonable price make this the clear version of choice.
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

The Twelfth is not Shostakovich's best symphony, but it's not as bad as its detractors would have us believe. The first two movements in particular are effectively structured and, respectively, cinematically exciting and quite atmospheric. The finale, especially its coda, is so telling an example of Socialist Realist triumph that it can only be accepted as a parody; and played without apology, as here, it works very well. Indeed, Vasily Petrenko leads a first movement that beats just about everyone in terms of sheer excitement, and the same holds true of the transitional third movement, "Aurora". As for that problematic finale, it has an appealing lightness (before the coda) that avoids any impression of facile note-spinning. If you don't like this symphony, give this performance a shot. It may change your mind.

The Sixth is far less troublesome, but Petrenko's vision is no less probing. At nearly 20 minutes the first movement is very slow, but wholly gripping. Petrenko takes the scherzo dazzlingly fast, but paces the finale moderately to give it the necessary weight (without sacrificing the music's irony and wit). Through it all the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic plays splendidly, and is excellently recorded. This Shostakovich series is shaping up as one of the best, make no mistake.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues

Although Shostakovich's chamber music is dominated by the fifteen string quartets, he also left his mark on the piano trio, the piano quintet and the accompanied sonatas.

Vasily Petrenko’s Shostakovich cycle marches on. This is volume seven. I presume there are four more to follow as and when Petrenko sets down the Fourth Symphony – to which I’m particularly looking forward – and numbers 7, 13 and 14.
 
This latest instalment pairs symphonies from the opposite chronological ends of the composer’s symphonic output. Number 2 was written to mark the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. Perhaps ominously – in terms of potential for artistic merit – it was commissioned by the Propaganda Division of the State Music Publishers’ Section. Interestingly, Richard Whitehouse relates in his notes that, initially, the work was not designated as a symphony; Shostakovich only took that step, it seems, a couple of years later. The work is in one continuous movement and in the last six minutes or so an SATB chorus is introduced. Their task is to deliver the four-stanza poem by one Alexander Bezimensky (1898-1973). Richard Whitehouse describes him as an “’official’ proletarian poet” but if this is a fair example of his work the term “party hack” might be more appropriate. Clearly, Shostakovich had no say in the choice of text and, apparently, he didn’t think much of it.
 
Richard Whitehouse observes that the symphony was composed during the most overtly modernist phase of his career. One might suggest that the term “brutalist” might also fairly apply to this score. Naxos helpfully split the piece into three separate tracks and these are reflected in the liner-notes. Shostakovich can be a forbidding composer at times but in this score we find him at his most experimental and intractable. For a start there are virtually no melodic themes in it – the trumpet tune that appears a couple of minutes into the score is more or less the only melody, as Whitehouse points out. Given the absence of themes it’s perhaps unsurprising that I struggle to discern any sort of development in the conventional sense. For example, I find it hard to see what relation the first five or six minutes of the score (track 1) bear to the music that follows, except as an unrelated introduction, perhaps. The music that opens the second section (track 2) is reminiscent of parts of the First Symphony. As this section unfolds the music becomes ever more strident. After a solo violin passage the texture becomes increasingly complex but it’s hard to see what all the activity signifies. Hereabouts the playing of the RLPO is tremendously vigorous and earlier, when the music was stirring to life from very subdued beginnings, there was no little finesse to the playing. So far as I can tell the performance is also very precise.
 
It would be kind to describe the words of the concluding choral section as banal; the poem is unmitigated Revolutionary tosh! Shostakovich “rewards” the poet with choral writing of no great distinction; these final minutes are brash and boldly coloured but, to be honest, one feels it’s a case of sound and fury signifying nothing. It’s richly ironic that when Shostakovich produced the sort of music that the authorities expected he wrote such stuff as this but when he composed music that was not in keeping with official expectations – in the Sixth or Eighth Symphonies, for instance – he produced his finest work. Vasily Petrenko and his orchestra – and choir – do their best for the score and give a colourful and committed account of it but, really, this is base metal. I find it perplexing, to say the least, to trace Shostakovich’s development as a symphonist from the precocious First Symphony through to the magnificent, complex Fourth. Indeed, the Second and Third Symphonies don’t really seem to offer much in the way of a bridge between those two tremendous scores.
 
I find the Fifteenth Symphony just as perplexing but in a very different way. Just what was Shostakovich saying this late score? What was going on behind that impassive face and those slightly owlish thick spectacles? A troubled spirit, it would seem, but what was troubling him?
 
One of the great enigmas of this score lies in the use made of quotations. Shostakovich made use of self-quotation in his music but to the best of my knowledge it was rare for him to quote other composers. Yet here, in what turned out to be his last symphony, we find him quoting from two composers – and from two radically different composers at that – as well as from himself.
 
The first movement opens deceptively with perky material on flute and then bassoon. The opening pages are reminiscent of the Ninth Symphony it seems to me. Then, at 1:57 the trumpet plays a familiar motif from Rossini’s William Tell overture. The Rossini motif has been foreshadowed in the moments leading up to its first appearance – the first of several in the movement – but what is the meaning? I confess I’m far from sure except to note that the motif is of a piece with Shostakovich’s characteristic sardonic streak and that, though the fragment of tune stands out every time we hear it, it is well integrated into the composer’s own material. The music becomes increasingly urgent, alarmed and, indeed, strident in tone and the reappearances of the Rossini quote seem to act as a brake on proceedings and to bring the music back to a less stressful, more insouciant level. Throughout this movement, whatever the mood of the music, the playing of the RLPO is crisp and characterful.
 
The second movement takes us to an altogether deeper level – though in saying that I don’t wish to imply that the first movement is superficial; it’s not. The Adagio opens with a brass chorale, which recurs at intervals as the movement unfurls. I think it’s hugely significant that this chorale is taken from the opening movement, The Palace Square, of the Eleventh Symphony, a work that I still think has yet to receive its full recognition within the composer’s output. It will be remembered that the Eleventh commemorates the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. The chorale is followed by extended glacial passages in which cello and viola solos are prominent. Here we are in the world of the string quartets. This is spare, searching music that has the character of a threnody. Petrenko and his players are excellent in maintaining the tension in these sparsely scored paragraphs, a virtue I < admired in their traversal of the first movement of the Sixth Symphony. Eventually (at 6:50) we hear an idea on the flutes but it’s not until this is taken up at some length by a solo trombone that it becomes clear that this is a funeral march. Eventually (at 11:01) the march erupts almost out of nothing into a huge climax. When this is spent the chorale returns, firstly on hushed strings and then on the brass. Now, I think, having experienced the funeral march we perhaps understand the significance of the quotation form the Eleventh. Is it that Shostakovich had unfinished business with the failed revolutionaries of 1905? Is he saying in this movement that those revolutionaries were betrayed by the Stalinist excesses in the years that followed the successful revolution of 1917?
 
The third movement, which follows attacca, is extremely brief. Richard Whitehouse rightly draws attention to the “barbed humour”. This is real nose-thumbing, sneering music and it’s adroitly done by Petrenko’s orchestra which offers some suitably pungent playing. Unless my ears deceive me the horns make a reference to the old DSCH motif one last time in a Shostakovich symphony.
 
The finale brings us the quotations from a second composer: Wagner. Right at the start the low brass intone the ‘fate’ motif from Die Walküre, followed by the soft timpani tattoo from Siegfried’s Funeral Music in Götterdämmerung. A few moments later (at 1:07) there’s surely another Wagner reference. The violins have an extended melody and as a kind of upbeat to it they play the same three notes with which Tristan begins. It’s possible that this is a coincidence but I don’t think so. The melody itself is described by Richard Whitehouse as “graceful”. I know what he means but I’m not sure that description is the full story: it sounds to me to be a spectral kind of grace; as so often with Shostakovich ambiguity is everywhere. This long, winding violin theme serves as the impetus for much of the content of the succeeding paragraphs. After another appearance of the ‘fate’ motif (5:28) what is at first a ghostly passacaglia begins. The music grows in temperature and intensity until a substantial climax is reached (10:08). This is another – and the last – of Shostakovich’s trademark towering symphonic climaxes and in it I hear definite echoes – grim ones – of the Leningrad Symphony. After the climax has subsided the music becomes wan and lean again; here the playing of the RLPO is once again most effective. The ending is enigmatic; the soft, tintinnabulating percussion over soft string chords recalls the conclusion of the Fourth Symphony, albeit the passage is longer this time. With a soft bell chime Shostakovich writes finis to his canon of symphonies.
 
The Fifteenth is a difficult symphony, not because its language is difficult in the way that the language of the Second is gratuitously difficult. It’s difficult because it’s so hard to grasp what are the composer’s intentions. I bought Maxim Shostakovich’s 1972 première recording when it came out – I still have the LP – and yet, even after all these years I’m not confident that I fully comprehend this elusive piece. I am sure, however, that it’s a fine and expressive composition and it’s the work of a mature and highly experienced symphonist whereas the Second is the work of a young, iconoclastic innovator. I don’t believe that earlier piece is genuinely symphonic in the sense of including any conventional development of ideas.
 
I doubt I shall listen often to the Second, though I’m sure that Vasily Petrenko and his choir and orchestra serve it well. I’m certain, however, that I shall return to this performance of the Fifteenth which strikes me as being excellent both in terms of the interpretation and the execution. The Naxos sound is very good: it reports the massive climaxes very well but conveys equally successfully the many quiet passages, both at the start of the Second and during the Fifteenth. As usual, Richard Whitehouse’s notes are very good at outlining the background to the works and at describing each score. However, it’s slightly disappointing that he doesn’t attempt any real discussion of the quotations in the Fifteenth beyond saying that they’re present.
 
This is another fine instalment in this important Shostakovich symphony cycle and I hope we won’t have to wait too long for the next release.
 
-- John Quinn, MusicWeb International

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One of the nice things about Vasily Petrenko’s ongoing Shostakovich cycle, now well past its halfway point, is that it is making me reevaluate symphonies I did not think so highly of previously. The conductor’s recent recording of the Third Symphony (with the First, on Naxos 8.572396) inspired me to comment, “Petrenko’s reading is so full of good humor—and perhaps a little sarcasm—that I found myself enjoying this symphony more than usual.” Well, the Second is, for the most part, just as good, aided and abetted by some really fun playing from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and exciting sound from Naxos’s engineering team. The opening pages, an extended bass drum roll, quietly played, and soon overlaid by what Shostakovich called “ultrapolyphony” (27 simultaneously played voices) create a strikingly Ivesian effect. Now, Ives was ahead of his time, and so was the young Shostakovich, who anticipated several of the 20th century’s later musical developments in this symphony. Petrenko pulls it off with impudence, and the factory whistle that introduces the chorus has never been more visceral in its impact. (Shostakovich advised that, in the absence of a factory whistle, a chord for horns and trombones could be used instead. I am not sure what is being used here—it sounds like a jet engine, actually—but it is most impressive.) The chorus is almost as idiomatic as it was in the Third Symphony, and if the singers sound a little hoarse, I can forgive them. (Shostakovich shows neither the orchestra nor the chorus much mercy in this symphony.) Perhaps that’s what singing about Lenin and communes does to one.
Few people doubt the importance of the 15th Symphony. In fact, in bolstering its stature, and its place as the terminal symphony in Shostakovich’s canon, conductors have a tendency to make it seem more funereal than perhaps is necessary. Petrenko’s reading takes 48: 35, which really is quite slow, but this is one of those times when the subjective tempos seem faster. I think this is because Petrenko plays up the chamber music-like textures that dominate this work; slow is not the same as heavy, after all. Also, he is almost maliciously funny in the first movement, and in the third. Yes, the humor is of the black variety, but Petrenko applies it delicately, and as a consequence, there is more subtlety and nuance here than one expects even in this symphony. There are many examples of particularly fine solo playing from several members of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, too. Surely, this is one of the best versions of the 15th Symphony currently available—right up there with one of Kondrashin’s recordings, or (for something much richer) Ormandy’s. Petrenko’s Second easily eclipses Morton Gould’s and Bernard Haitink’s (to name two of the most famous alternatives). For the Shostakovich fan, there’s every reason to get this newest release from Petrenko, and no good reason not to. Have at it.
FANFARE: Raymond Tuttle

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. He ferrets out every subtle detail of scoring in the crepuscular Allegretto while never permitting the music to drag. His finale has just the right manic high spirits, and he clarifies the DSCH motive in the timpani at the end better than anyone else ever has. It's all captured in gloriously vivid, present sonics by the Naxos engineers. Thrilling, perfect, essential--a magnificent achievement and hands down the modern reference recording.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com