Classical Music

SHOSTAKOVICH: Film Music, Vol. 3- Hamlet, The Unforgettable

With this latest volume in their ongoing cycle, recorded in 2023, the Quartetto Nous passes the halfway mark of Shostakovich's 15 quartets. The previous instalments have been recognised and praised for their full-blooded intensity and uncompromising address to the detail of these absorbing scores. The present album returns almost to the start of Shostakovich's quartet cycle, with a piece which he claimed (perhaps as a joke) he had originally written as his Second Quartet, before adding a piano part to make it a Piano Quintet with which he could tour and earn much-needed income. At any rate, the Piano Quintet took shape in 1940 and soon became one of his most popular pieces of chamber music: less radical in form and harmony than most of his quartet writing, more extrovert in mood, and more approachable. The Second Quartet proper was composed in 1944, soon after the Leningrad Symphony which had won the composer international celebrity. Yet the two works exemplify the contrast in style between Shostakovich's 'public' and 'private' works. The Waltz of the Second Quartet is one of the most extraordinary examples of his ability to transform instrumental writing into a kind of nightmare factory. Having begun in a determined A major, the Quartet closes in a much more equivocal minor. The Fourth Quartet of 1949 likewise sets out in an almost folksy D major, working in elements of Yiddish melodies, and it's skies gradually cloud over during the four movements, until the sadness of the second movement and the vitality of the third fuse to produce the violent, wailing and screaming tones of a danse macabre in the complex finale. By the time of the Sixth Quartet, written in 1955, Shostakovich had become a practised exponent of double-edged rhetoric, of music which wears a happy face while twisting it's hands in anxiety or even agony. The serene light of G major bathes the initial Allegretto, but there are signs of grief, perhaps occasioned by the recent death of his wife Nina, scattered throughout the composition. The Quartetto Nous (from the Greek: intellect, mind, but also inspiration, creative capacity), has established itself among the most interesting musical Italian ensembles of it's generation, giving captivating interpretations in which the Italian tradition of string-playing merges with other significant European schools such as the Musik Akademie in Basel (where they studied with Rainer Schmidt of the Hagen Quartett), and the Accademia Chigiana in Siena (Gunter Pichler of the Alban Berg Quartett). Winner, among other awards, of the Farulli Prize in the Abbiati competition, the most prestigious award of Italian music criticism, the Quartetto Nous demonstrate their individual approach to music spanning the quartet repertoire, and in ambitious contexts such as playing from memory and totally in the dark. - The new installment of the complete String Quartets by Shostakovich played by Quartetto Nous brings together the quartets 2, 4 and 6, as well as the impressive and moving piano quintet. - Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) is without doubt one of the most famous and influential composers of 20th century Russia. He lived in a time of Soviet repression and, though outwardly a loyal communist, he resented the restrictions imposed by the regime on his creativity. This led to a fascinating duality between conformism and the expression of his most innermost feelings, fears and anger. - Shostakovich's 15 String Quartets form an impressive body which follows the development of his style throughout his life. They are the testimony of a tortured soul struggling to remain true to himself, expressed in anguish and bleakness, but also in serenity and bliss. - Quartetto Nous, formed in 2011, has established itself in a short time as one of the most interesting chamber music ensembles of it's generation. It's immersive performances are the result of a professional training where the Italian tradition and the most influential European schools are combined. The quartet studied with the Quartetto di Cremona at the Accademia Walter Stauffer in Cremona, at the Basel Musik Akademie with Rainer Schmidt (Hagen Quartet), at the Escuela Superior de M�sica 'Reina Sofia' in Madrid and at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena with Gunter Pichler (Alban Berg Quartet) and at the Lubeck Musikhochschule with Heime Muller (Artemis Quartet). - The first volume of the Shostakovich Quartets by Quartetto Nous for Brilliant Classics was hailed enthusiastically by the press. Musicweb writes:" This is one of the best as it left me in awe of the breadth as well as the intensity of Shostakovich's genius, RECORDING OF THE MONTH".

This is Leonard Bernstein's later version of Shostakovich's Fifth, captured live while the New York Philharmonic was on tour in Tokyo. It's an excellent performance, similar to Bernstein's first reading, but a bit broader on the whole, and better (or at least more closely) recorded. The finale still goes very quickly, a decision that Shostakovich himself supported, and Bernstein treats it more as an unabashed triumph than a hollow victory, which is also perfectly in keeping with the musical possibilities. Elsewhere he remains a powerful and passionate exponent of the work, turning in an exceptionally intense Largo and a take-no-prisoners first-movement development section. Of course, he's also on firm ground in the Mahlerian scherzo, and the response of the Philharmonic is all that we might reasonably ask.


The coupling is no mere make-weight. Rudolf Barshai prepared all four of Shostakovich's chamber symphonies from their various string quartets, and no one conducts them better. This one, the most popular and frequently played, comes from the tragic Eighth Quartet, and while DG also has an excellent Barshai recording of the piece, this one has nothing to fear from the competition. It's an extremely solid performance that doesn't stint on the music's dark drama. The scorching second movement, with its frantic Jewish dance music alternating with the composer's DSCH monogram, is heavier than you might be used to from the quartet original, but it's entirely logical given the larger forces used. Barshai, a string player himself, really knows how the music ought to go, and the sonics are excellent. This is a fine, very welcome reissue.
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

SYMPHONY NO. 8 IN C MINOR, OP.

This is a DSD (Direct Stream Digital) recording

SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartets: No. 3; No. 14; No. 15. Piano Quintet • Juilliard Str Qrt; Yefim Bronfman (pn) • SONY 79018 (2 CDs: 127:38)


Among the releases celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Juilliard String Quartet (of course, none of the original members remain) is this most welcome set of Shostakovich quartets. Welcome because, despite the Juilliard’s longstanding commitment to 20th-century music in general and their having given the American premiere of the 15th Quartet in 1975 (with two of the current members, cellist Joel Krosnick and violist Samuel Rhodes, participating) in particular, this is apparently their first recording of any Shostakovich quartets. (The performance of the Piano Quintet, however, was recorded in 1999 and originally issued along with Bronfman’s account of Shostakovich’s two piano concertos—see Fanfare 23:4.) Most welcome because the quartet brings its usual penetrating insight and commitment to this music.


Truth be told, their account of the Third Quartet didn’t grab me on first hearing. With the rich, resonant, tonally nuanced sound of the Borodin Quartet foremost in my memory, the Juilliards initially seemed lean and distant, and the way they speed through the score came across as unfocused nervous energy (following a moderately paced Allegretto, slower than most, they take three of the four remaining movements significantly faster than the Borodins). But after several rehearings, I came to appreciate the different interpretive details they bring out—such as the jangly Cubist feel they give the first movement’s quasi-fugue and the excitement they obtain by whipping up the tempo in its concluding pages, or the gypsyish quality that their quick phrasing suggests after reference point 55 in the third movement. They may not dig as deep as the Borodins; instead, theirs is a more measured, varied perspective—for example, though lacking the Borodins’ remarkable tension at dramatic points, such as the expressive passage at 108 in the finale, they redeem themselves by deftly emphasizing the dance tune that appears almost immediately thereafter, as if to soften the blow. My ears also gradually adjusted to the recorded sound, so that I came to realize what at first seemed distant was actually more of a natural concert hall ambience and balance than the beefed up (and effective, but enhanced) engineering afforded the Borodins (EMI).


If the Third Quartet benefited from a bit of familiarity to reveal its irony and edginess, the Juilliard’s 14th and 15th Quartets were immediately engaging and convincing—all the more impressive as these are Shostakovich’s two most enigmatic quartets. The 14th is dedicated to Sergei Shirinsky, cellist of the Beethoven Quartet, and here Joel Krosnick makes the most of his featured role. I once wrote in a review that I wouldn’t argue with Royal S. Brown’s assessment of this quartet as “the least appealing, least original, and least successful of the 15” ( Fanfare 12:1), but the Juilliard interpretation has put this music into a new light for me. They fearlessly attack the score’s dissonances, making it sound more tonally ambiguous—and thus simultaneously more original and mysterious—than has any other ensemble in my experience. In their hands, the opening pages sound like a drunken Beethovenian aborted fugue—high spirited but slightly off-kilter—and even the fragmented finale is played with an intensity that makes it sound more coherent than ever before.


In the 15th Quartet as well, notorious for its six introspective Adagio movements, the Juilliards don’t shy away from the music’s bleakness and occasional harshness. They embrace its stark, transparent textures—the waltz in the second movement (ironically titled “Serenade”) isolates individual lines like exposed nerves, and Rhodes’s viola solo opening the “Nocturne” is not pretty, but painfully necessary. Though separated by 35 years, the mood of the opening pages of the final quartet is remarkably similar to that of the second movement fugue in the Piano Quintet, growing from simple motifs into a contrapuntal web of deep emotion until chant-like themes emerge as temporary balm, offered without exaggeration or pathos. Speaking of the Piano Quintet, Bronfman is an ideal partner—a powerful presence in the Richter mold, who can project tenderness or urgency as called for, and whose attitude is perfectly in sync with the Juilliard’s direct, yet dramatic approach.


In sum, these are distinguished, distinctive performances that interpretively fall in between the robust, sometimes exaggerated Russianness of the Borodin or Sorrel style, and the brisk, almost analytical precision of the Fitzwilliam and Emerson accounts. Is it too early to start thinking about this year’s Want List?


FANFARE: Art Lange

PIANO QUINTET OCTET

Classical Music

SHOSTAKOVICH Film Music: Viborg District. The Man With a Gun. The Great Citizen. Passer-By. Sofia Perovskaya • Walter Mnatsakanov, cond; Byelorussian RTV SO • DELOS 2003 (65:01)


Between 1932 and 1939—spanning the period of his lowest fortune following the Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk debacle in 1934 and his revitalization with the Fifth Symphony in ’37—Shostakovich composed music for 13 films. It was his most active decade, cinematically speaking, by far, and though scoring Soviet revolutionary-themed films was the means by which he attempted to rehabilitate his career, the music, though suggesting varying degrees of inspiration, was not limited to populist fodder. The excerpts offered here, from (in chronological order) Passer-By (better known as The Counterplan ) in 1932, Viborg District , and The Great Citizen to The Man With a Gun from 1939, are fragmented re-creations from the original scores. (This recording, from 1995, used the material available at the time in the published Collected Works edition, which was to be expanded and re-edited beginning in 1999. More music from these films may now be in circulation.) It makes sense that these existing fragments were the most accessible pieces from the films—fanfares, stirring marches, and familiar or original folk songs. But there are the occasionally more interesting episodes where Shostakovich’s idiosyncrasies emerge, such as the extended, eloquent Funeral March from The Great Citizen , and the ominous, symphonic scene-painting of The Man With a Gun , which includes a few Wagnerian paraphrases and anticipates some of John Williams’s Star Wars maneuvers. It’s a shame that we’re not able to hear any examples of what John Riley in Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film (Tauris, London) described as his “smudging the line between music and sound-effects, using factory noises as a percussive underlay to the etched and other dark music” in Passer-By.


But the most radical and most valuable music on this disc are the 16 pieces from Sofia Perovskaya, composed in 1968 while Shostakovich was hospitalized, recovering from having broken bones in both legs. Remarkably, though he was unable to view the film beforehand, he composed these set pieces solely from a copy of the script, knowing the director’s timing of the individual scenes. The story is about the rebellious activities of the title heroine, who was executed in 1881 for her participation in the plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander II. For the most part, Shostakovich’s music reflects his mature perspective—a profound cello soliloquy, the fully sustained symphonic momentum of several longer passages, even a waltz reminiscent of Nino Rota—but there are also strange episodes that flash back to his eccentric, youthful style. Two scenes are devoted to timpani with only brief trumpet interruptions; there is a section of choral writing stylistically somewhere between Stravinsky (think Symphony of Psalms ) and Ligeti; and his use of piccolo to project a spirited, mocking anti-military presence in the “March” and “Execution”—the latter silenced in midphrase—is a reminder of his earliest, most audacious music.


Primarily because of Sofia Perovskaya , this release offers the non-specialist a more engaging musical experience than the majority of these compilations. Recommended to anyone who wants a sampling of Shostakovich’s commonplace and exceptional work for film.


FANFARE: Art Lange

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

SHOSTAKOVICH Cello Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 • Truls Mørk (vc); Vasily Petrenko, cond; Oslo PO • ONDINE 1218-2 (64:59) Live: Oslo 1/30–2/1/2013


These cello concertos are relatively late works, and both were written for Mstislav Rostropovich. The First appeared in 1959, six years after the death of Stalin, at a time when official pressure on the composer had eased––yet Shostakovich never got over the terrors of the 1940s. This is the perfect work to illustrate the position he was in. Soviet authorities at the time of the Cold War were locked into an “anything you can do, we can do better” standoff with the rest of the world, particularly with the USA, so they needed to show off their world-famous composer. For the same reason, they allowed the West access to their greatest musicians, including Rostropovich. All was fine as long as everybody toed the official Communist line, but Soviet officials never really trusted Shostakovich, and rightly so. The concerto quite plainly depicts the cries of a desperate individual (the cello) up against the power of the state (the orchestra). There is no room for compromise on either side. In the cadenza preceding the finale, the cello hopelessly repeats thematic fragments like a soul trapped, while a passage of sour, circus-like music in the final movement sees the protagonist going through his paces with pointless, frenzied zeal. The work is unambiguously autobiographical: Shostakovich introduces himself in the cello’s opening phrases with the repeated DSCH motif, so there is never any doubt who this solo cello is intended to personify.


The Second Cello Concerto was composed in 1966, just prior to Symphony No. 14, a symphonic song cycle in which he set poems on the subject of death. The two works came in the wake of a heart attack. Fittingly, the cello part, while still in opposition to outside forces, now seems more reflective and less inclined to protest (except for parts of the short Allegretto movement). The brief cadenza in this work depicts resignation: quiet desperation and regret rather than defiance, an attitude that would color all of the composer’s subsequent music.


This kind of pop-psych analysis of Shostakovich’s music is frowned upon in some quarters, but is inescapable when faced with a recording like this one. Mørk identifies completely with the cello-as-individual approach, as anyone who has seen and heard him live in the First Concerto will attest. He attacks both works with every fiber of his being, to coin a cliché, precisely conveying each emotional nuance of the score. The personal nature of his performance is emphasized here by a close-up recording: We hear both soloist and orchestra from the conductor’s point of view, literally “in your face.” Petrenko’s Shostakovich has been much praised, and he elicits thoroughly committed playing from the soloists and sections of the orchestra. At the very opening of the First Concerto, where the cello’s DSCH phrases are answered by repeated chords in the winds, I thought their response was a fraction slower each time than the tempo set by Mørk, or at least not as decisively delivered. From then on the orchestral support is unswerving, with exceptionally strong work from the first horn.


The Norwegian cellist has recorded both concertos before. His previous disc was made in 1995 for Virgin, where he was accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Mariss Jansons. (Ironically, Jansons was then Chief Conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic.) That earlier recording has a more straightforward balance, with the orchestra set back, allowing Mørk’s cello to dominate. His interpretation does not seem to have changed substantially over 18 years––he was magnificent then, too––but the current recording brings greater immediacy. The London orchestra strikes me as tighter in ensemble but less emotionally involved. The earlier disc is nevertheless extremely fine. I would also recommend hearing the larger-than-life, Romantically inclined rendition of both concertos on DG by Misha Maisky (with the London Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas)––especially moving in the Second––and it goes without saying that Rostropovich in any of his recordings is in a class of his own.


FANFARE: Phillip Scott

Classical Music