Classical Music

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7, 'Leningrad'

This may not be the most harrowing version of the Eighth, but of its type it's unquestionably a great performance. Often this symphony consists of hair-raising climaxes interspersed between acres of nothingness. Not here. This symphony also is one of Shostakovich's most formally masterly and imaginative, and this performance reminds us in the most compelling way. Petrenko's flowing tempos in the first movement and passacaglia keep the music moving, not lurching, forward at all times. The 25 minutes of the first movement seem to pass by in half that time. Its opening threnody in particular has even more expressive power than usual for being phrased in long melodic arcs that never turn static.

After an aptly gawky scherzo, the toccata is as brilliant and menacing as any (with a dashingly militant central section), but it's the finale that really sets the seal on this performance. The Eighth always is a tough piece to project convincingly, but Petrenko is at his absolute best here, pacing the music perfectly and timing the climax in such a way that (for once) it doesn't sound like a less impressive recapitulation of the first movement--and this isn't because its previous occurrence is underplayed in any way. Excellent playing from all departments of the orchestra plus vividly natural engineering complete what is easily the best installment of this ongoing cycle to date.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

The Fitzwilliam String Quartet celebrates a remarkable milestone with this special fiftieth anniversary recording of Shostakovich’s last three string quartets. Fittingly, this landmark recording will look back to the music which first propelled the Fitzwilliam to international prominence. Shostakovich entrusted the Fitzwilliam with the western premieres of his last three quartets (Nos. 13, 14, 15), and before long they had become the first ever group to perform and record all fifteen, winning many international awards along the way. The highly innovative String Quartet No.13 is notable for its unique single-movement form and the virtuosic viola writing, which shines a spotlight on founding member Alan George. No.14, despite its twelve-tone structure, is perhaps the most accessible of Shostakovich’s late quartets with a wealth of identifiable melodies. The six movements of No.15 are profoundly melancholic and intimate, with the composer’s obsession with death a clear influence. The Fitzwilliam’s pre-eminence in the interpretation of these works has persisted: Benjamin Britten reported after Shostakovich’s death in 1975 that the composer had told him the Fitzwilliam were his ‘preferred performers of my quartets’.

Great performances of this massive symphony aren’t exactly thick on the field, but my goodness, this is one of them. Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic play with 100 percent commitment in every single bar. The first movement opens broadly, the intensity already palpable. Taking full advantage of excellent sound and a wide dynamic range (crank up the volume for this one), the central march and battle will have you sweating in your seat. The unrelentingly sustained passion that Petrenko brings to this long section triumphantly vindicates Shostakovich’s controversial vision, and at the same time makes short work of a 28-minute overall timing.

It may sound odd, but what stands out most in the scherzo (for me anyway) is the strikingly sharp pizzicato violins accompanying the shrill clarinet in the movement’s central outburst (sound sample below). Obviously this isn’t the most important idea, but the fact that Petrenko and his strings take such care to characterize even simple accompaniments helps us to understand just why this performance is so compelling. Like the first movement, the Adagio has a strikingly intense central episode, one whose contrasting power helps to sustain interest in the slow, grave outer sections. Then we come to the finale, with a thrilling, wild allegro, and a broad, take-no-prisoners coda that’s simply immense. Petrenko’s Shostakovich cycle already is one of the best out there, but this release really puts the seal on his achievement. This is absolutely essential, and as I said, it’s exceptionally well recorded to boot.

– David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Shostakovich scored dozens of films, starting in the silent era with a long, almost symphonic, accompaniment to Kozintsev and Trauberg’s New Babylon (1929). At the last minute the censors imposed heavy cuts on the film and there wasn’t time even to begin to try and make Shostakovich’s music fit what was left of the film. For his next film Odna (Alone) Shostakovich decided to make things easier for everybody and wrote music in easily assimilated portions ranging in duration from about 30 seconds to four and a half minutes. There are 48 cues on this CD – the complete score for the film.

Odna was planned as the first Soviet sound film but, due to the bulkiness of the sound recording equipment, it was shot, on location, as a silent with the soundtrack being added later at the Leningrad studios. As the soundtrack was poor, title cards were used as well as sound – hence the description of a sound/silent film. The plot is simplicity itself. Elena, a young teacher looks forward to a life with her husband-to-be in Leningrad but she is sent to the Altai, on the Mongolian border. She tries to teach the children, and they enjoy their lessons, but the parents need them to tend the sheep. Elena nearly dies in a snowdrift but is rescued “thanks to the Soviet State”, as a title card tells us. Finally, Elena leaves the Altai and returns to Leningrad, but we have no idea if her presence in the village has made any difference to the lives if the people she leaves behind. Shostakovich is much more positive in his closing music, giving a quite optimistic view.

The music covers a wide variety of styles and moods. There’s a lot of the kind of music we know from The Age of Gold, and the opera The Nose, circus music similar to that which appears in the first movement of the 4th Symphony, highly serious (but with a slight thumbing of the nose) for the village Soviet chairman waking up (track 29), but there’s also high drama, especially in the scenes where Elena nearly freezes to death, a very evocative use of the Theremin here.

The booklet tells us that this is one of Shostakovich’s best scores. It’s certainly one of his most varied and it’s easy to follow the slender plot. There’s also some delightful orchestrations – I particularly loved the duet for bassoons and harp and the duet for oboe and wood blocks! – ranging from full orchestra to chamber music combinations. You can hear the orchestral sound Shostakovich became famous for, sometimes in embryo, in almost every track.

The restoration of the score was obviously a labour of love. Much time and effort has obviously gone into the making of this disk. The performance is excellent: the orchestra is on top form and the soloists are, mercifully, lacking the kind of wide vibrato we used to get from Soviet singers.

All in all, an exciting release which finally does justice to a score we have only really known, in tantalisingly incomplete form, through Rozhdestvensky’s short Suite - which he recorded in the early 1980s, and which is now available in a 14 disk set from BMG/Melodia, or as a 2 disk set of Manuscripts from Different Years 74321 59058 2 - a version of the Suite by Dmitri Smirnov for wind ensemble (Netherlands Wind Ensemble, Meladina Record MRCD0021) and a Russian Disc issue of 1995 (RD CD 10 007) which included 29 cues from the score.

This is the real thing and it was worth the wait. Recording and notes are superb.

This Naxos series of Film Music Classics simply goes from strength to strength.

-- Bob Briggs, MusicWeb International

Without doubt this is one of the finest all-round achievements by Naxos.

At the risk of courting the charge of hyperbole I would venture this CD as one of the most significant Shostakovich releases in recent years. Fine though the award-laden Petrenko symphony cycle undoubtedly is, let's be honest we already know that is an extraordinary group of works and most have received superb performances before. The score presented here is as significant as it is relatively unknown and this new recording can lay fair claim to being definitive. My reasoning runs as follows; Shostakovich was one of the most important Soviet composers. The Soviet Union was the first state to recognise the power of cinema to influence mass mood and opinion. In the late 1920s the cultural elite of the Soviet Union were still being empowered by the state to produce work that was radical and revolutionary. Exploring utopian ideals and cinema was regarded as being at the forefront of the new radical arts. In the era of Silent Cinema the dedicated film-score was still comparatively new and as such had to carry the dramatic and emotional non-visual weight of the story. Shostakovich had first-hand practical experience of playing for film - this gave him a practitioner’s insight into what would ‘work’ that was simply not part of the skill set of any composer before or probably since. As the liner accurately points out - for all the deprivation and residual violence abroad in the new Soviet State this was an age of idealism and hope. Shostakovich had yet to have his idealistic vision of communism curdled by the cynical realities of living in a totalitarian state. He poured into this score the best that the idiom would allow.
 
Whether measured by the yardstick of the history of cinema, the Soviet Union or simply as part of the Shostakovich oeuvre this is an important release. Add to that the fact that this recording offers the most complete, skilfully reconstructed and authentic - as far as it uses the original 14 player line-up - rendition of the score yet made. It becomes a compulsory purchase. This is the third release of Shostakovich film scores conducted by Mark Fitz-Gerald. Very fine indeed though the previous two have been I consider this the best so far. Not that the earlier issues lacked for anything in terms of performing or interpretative quality - simply that this work is more significant than the others on just about every level. Its importance is reflected in the fact that elements of the score have been recorded several times in the past although only the - also fine - version from James Judd on Capriccio with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra comes close to matching the actual quantity of music recorded. The next most extended sequence - from Valeri Polyansky and his Russian State Symphony Orchestra on Chandos (CHAN 9600) - contains some 44 minutes of the score - less than half of Fitz-Gerald’s epic traversal. A pithier selection is offered by Gennady Rohzdestvensky (Russian Disc RDCD11064). This was my introduction to this score in its original Melodiya LP version (later reissued as ASD3381) and I still enjoy its ribald cabaret character. My sole observation of this new Naxos performance - and it is an observation not a quibble - is that the chamber scale and super-refined quality of the playing fractionally detracts from the pure theatre of the work. When I was a student at the Guildhall School of Music in London - around 1983 I guess - they staged a viewing of this score accompanied by one of the college orchestras. To this day the power of the film and accompanying score lives with me. I strongly suggest that any readers who ever have the opportunity to see this performed live should leap at the chance. It is a magnificent piece of work and one that shows how even at the tender age of 23 Shostakovich understood the compelling power of the moving image. The very valid argument advanced by Fitz-Gerald for using chamber scale forces is that these are the maximum resources that Shostakovich would have had for the premiere. My counter-argument is that every silent movie score would be written with a degree of inherent elasticity. I find it hard to imagine for a moment that Shostakovich would not have preferred more players at the premiere - certainly many of the dramatic passages in the score do not sound as though they are intended for such a chamber group. That being said, Shostakovich was commissioned to provide a smaller orchestration suitable for use in the bulk of Soviet cinemas. Indeed reluctant musical directors often reverted to using generic music when the film was shown rather than attempting the complexities of this new score.
 
Every other recording has opted for a full standard orchestra. Although I do naturally veer towards the bigger sound the more I hear this performance the more I realise that this is a score full of proper music of considerable range and power. Initial impressions are of a riot of colour and witty referencing of popular period tunes from the Marseillaise to Offenbach. The New Babylon of the title refers to a department store which in turn is a metaphor for the decadent Paris pre the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The ensuing uprising and short-lived Paris Commune provided the early Soviet State with a historic precedent for their own revolution. Lessons learnt from the failure of the Commune influenced the thinking of both Marx and Lenin. Musical experts differ on whether Shostakovich used these melodies because they embodied all things despicably bourgeois or simply because they are rather good tunes. I tend towards the latter opinion - any young composer who can choose as his first dramatic work a setting of Gogol - The Nose - with its dyspeptic view of authority and institutions is not going to become a star-struck-slogan-wielding-party-line-puller two opus numbers later. At the heart of Shostakovich’s abiding genius is the acidic cynicism that clots and curdles even his most superficially benign music.
 
Fitz-Gerald conducts the Basel Sinfonietta and they prove to be stunningly fine collaborators. The scoring is for a string quartet plus bass, a woodwind quintet and a brass group of a second horn, two trumpets - although the second is there simply to relieve the work-load on the first player rather than having an independent part - and a trombone. The line-up is completed by a piano and three percussion. Again this number allows for ease of changes rather than necessity. The use of this essentially chamber ensemble creates an aural world that instantly delineates the composer's deft scoring. For the first time I heard a positively Gallic wit at work, very much along the lines of Ibert's Divertissement although, as always with Shostakovich, you feel a bleak cold despair might be lingering in the shadows. The spirit of "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die" clouds the celebrations. Another fascinating characteristic is developed here by the composer. In collaboration with the film-makers Shostakovich chose not to "illustrate the frame". When critics wish to deride a work the ultimate insult is to say its sounds like film music. This is a short-hand for saying it treats emotions/ideas/situations in an obvious and direct manner - in other words it illustrates the frame. Shostakovich does the reverse - if the image is happy, the music is sad, epic - petty. Its a crazy almost anarchic ploy but one that makes for an extraordinarily powerful juxtaposition of sight and sound. The problem we have here is that we are divorced from the image and wonderful though that is it cannot be anything less than a fraction of the whole.
 
Across the two discs the music is presented as a continuous flow of music as it occurred in each of the film's eight reels. The abiding impression is of a kaleidoscopic riot of sounds and impressions, fragments of musical stories, passing characters and changing mood. There is a hedonistic delight in the sheer indulgence of influence and pastiche. No real surprise to read that the original score quickly fell into disuse - it was both too hard for the average cinema player and too subversive for musicians brought up on a diet of illustrative generic music and excerpted 'classics'. From a historical perspective the quite remarkable thing is that as late as his Op.145 - his Suite on verses by Michaelangelo Shostakovich was applying exactly the same principle of contrast. There a verse with the slightly daunting title Immortality is set to an accompaniment of a piccolo whistling a tune any paperboy would be proud of. Back with New Babylon Fitz-Gerald has more practical experience of conducting this score in context with the film than any other person. This deep knowledge converts into a performance that is perfectly paced and remarkably finds a unity, a through-line in the midst of the mayhem. Allied to the virtuosic playing of his Swiss Orchestra and you will appreciate the level of achievement. The superlatives do not stop there. The engineering is first rate. The sound is quite close, certainly very detailed but it treads the tricky narrow line between large chamber group or small orchestra. The scale of the group is very effectively caught allowing the intimate passages to beguile while the bigger sequences have an impressive impact. Yes I do miss the sheer extra weight that Judd is able to deploy or the uniquely sly and sarcastic Rozhdestvensky. I repeat, the more I listened the more I was converted to the style of this version.

The booklet is surely Naxos' finest yet. Once one gets past the obligatory I-need-to-get-my-eyes-tested minute font this is packed with fascinating information, film stills and even a facsimile page of the original score. Fitz-Gerald has had to reconstruct the final part of the final reel because late in the film's production the ending changed turning the original bleak ending into something more positive. Fascinatingly we have two essays by Shostakovich scholars which give different interpretations for this change. One by David Robinson feels the changes were artistically driven whilst the other by John Riley cites political expediency. Both are full of fascinating insights. Riley provides a detailed synopsis and the notes are completed by an article by Fitz-Gerald outlining the long overdue restoration and reappraisal of this very important score. Don’t listen to this score expecting the profundity of the composer’s greatest work - that was never the remit here. Treated as a musico-social document - as well as containing much wonderfully entertaining music - this is a magnificent achievement from all concerned from composer to performers and the production team.

Curiously for a disc that is literally definitive it does not make me want to throw away either of the two other versions I cherish. Both Judd and Rozhdestvensky in their very differing ways offer valid alternative insights into this box of delights of a score. Judd with his full orchestra gains in impact during the set-piece sequences whilst Rozhdestvensky benefits from an authentically edgy Russian sound and gleeful eccentricity that is quite wonderful. The extra music that has been constructed to cover the discarded ending is effective and suitable but you will have made your mind up about this score and the performance way before that final sequence is reached. Fitz-Gerald achieves an ideal balance with his super-slick players able to slip from queasy waltz to buffoon’s gallop or poignant interlude in an instant. Remarkable results are achieved by ensembles these days in hot-house conditions of read/record. However when you hear a well rehearsed, convincingly argued performance of music with which the players are familiar the benefits are both obvious and great.

Without doubt this is one of the finest all-round achievements by Naxos. 

– Nick Barnard, MusicWeb International

Raphael Wallfisch recorded the First Cello Concerto for Chandos, one of the very first CD releases on that label, coupled with the Barber Concerto. It was a good performance, but it pales in comparison with his remake here. This set offers what is, hands down, the finest pairing of the two Shostakovich Cello Concertos since Heinrich Schiff and the composer's son--with all due respect to Rostropovich--set the modern standard in this music (on Philips). The First Concerto comes across with positively frightening intensity, a product not just of Wallfisch's strong projection of the solo, but also owing much to the take-no-prisoners accompaniments of Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony. Just listen to the interplay between Wallfisch and the sneering, threatening woodwind section--it's what this music is all about.

At the opening of the second movement, Wallfisch adopts a dusky, gamba-like sonority: think of Dowland's Lachrymae. The instrument truly seems to weep through the music, while the finale acquires an extra degree of bitter edge by being played very rhythmically, but not too quickly. Wallfisch really comes into his own in the cadenza, holding the entire movement together through perfect timing and a wide range of tone colors and dynamics. It's a great performance, as is that of the comparatively neglected Second Concerto.

Again we find soloist, conductor, and orchestra keenly attuned to the music's overt emotionalism. In the first movement, Wallfisch and Brabbins subtly characterize both the first and second subjects, preventing any hint of monotonous sameness in the exposition section. The development rises to a splendidly impassioned climax, followed by a ghostly coda that never drags.

In the central scherzo, once again a comparatively deliberate tempo combines with punchy rhythms to the music's expressive advantage, while the lengthy half-sweet, half-grotesque variation-finale never has been so colorfully projected. This is such a beautiful work; only the fact that it ends quietly and mysteriously conspires to keep it in the shadow of the First Concerto. In some ways it's even more melodically appealing, and this is a performance that captures its wide-ranging expression as well or better than any other.

The inclusion of the Cello Sonata and the cello arrangement of the late Viola Sonata, along with two miscellaneous short pieces, completes a package offering all of Shostakovich's music featuring solo cello. In the chamber works, John York is the sensitive piano accompanist, and both he and Wallfisch offer excellent interpretations of both large works. The finale of the Viola/Cello Sonata is particularly well held-together, with the youthful freshness of the earlier "true" Cello Sonata enthusiastically captured.

The engineering in the concertos is absolutely outstanding: balances between cello and orchestra are perfectly judged, but the microphones still capture a tremendous amount of ear-catching detail. Obviously a great deal of credit for this has to go to Brabbins and the orchestra, who offer none of that generic, lazy professionalism so common today. These performances display an idiomatic style of a kind that you seldom find even inside Russia today (witness Pletnev's often bland Russian National Orchestra, or Gergiev's mediocre Kirov band). The result is an absolutely irresistible set that no fan of Shostakovich will want to miss.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensemble: Russian Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Dmitry Yablonsky.

Shostakovich's film score to Hamlet is one of his finest, possibly because it's a serious film rather than a socialist-realist potboiler, and the composer's moody, mostly spare music supports the action with unfailing accuracy and makes compelling listening on its own. The well-known suite leaves out a lot of music, and while there's inevitably a degree of repetition involved, this complete recording is very welcome for its inclusion of such segments as "Hamlet's Parting from Ophelia", "Hamlet's Monologue", "Ophelia's Descent into Madness", "Hamlet at Ophelia's Grave", and "The Cemetery".

As you may have guessed from the titles, the added music creates a considerably darker overall impression than does the suite, and this in a work that begins with the "whip-crack" motive from the third movement of Shostakovich's not-exactly-jocose Thirteenth Symphony "Babi Yar". So it may not be the most emotionally varied score, but it does sound very Russian and very much like late Shostakovich, and conductor Dmitry Yablonsky treats it accordingly. He and his orchestra bring just as much conviction and intensity (try "The Ghost") as they would to one of the symphonies, and Naxos' sonics are vivid. Be sure, however, to get the regular stereo CD: the SACD is a failure, with way too much stuff coming from the rear channels. Definitely worth owning.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Full review from FANFARE Magazine:
Shakespeare’s indecisive hero played a persistent role in Shostakovich’s life. In 1932, the composer completed incidental music for a controversial stage production directed by Nikolai Akimov. Five years later, when the Fifth Symphony was completed, some commentators referred to it as the “Hamlet” Symphony because of its brooding and equivocal moods, and the composer himself did not escape comparisons with the great Dane. Given Shostakovich’s sizable experience with film scores, it was only natural for him to write the score to Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet in 1964. Over the years, there have been several recordings of the eight-item suite (op. 116a) that Lev Atovmian assembled from the score. This CD, however, appears to be the premiere recording of the complete score, including music that didn’t even make it into the film.

At this juncture, one usually makes the comment that Shostakovich’s film scores do not represent his best work, and that they shouldn’t be considered “typical” of his output. Even though I’ve made them myself, I’ve often found those comments a little condescending, however, and with Hamlet, we have music that is both top-of-the-line and typical of Shostakovich. To put this score in a chronological perspective, it is flanked by the 13th and 14th Symphonies, and it was completed in the same year as the Ninth and 10th String Quartets—hardly bad company! There’s much in Hamlet that is reminiscent of the composer’s very best work from this period. Shostakovich probably could write film music in his sleep, but it is clear that Hamlet engaged his attention and creativity in a very profound way.

Granted, not all the music is brilliant and essential—even 14-second fanfares have been included among these 23 tracks—but there’s much that is worth hearing outside of Atovmian’s suite. For example, the wonderfully eerie “Story of Horatio and the Ghost” might have been an outtake from the first movement of the 11th Symphony, and the five-minute “Hamlet’s Parting from Ophelia” proves once again that a note of music is worth a thousand words. A gently tinkling harpsichord aptly evokes both a courtly atmosphere and Ophelia’s emotional fragility. Hamlet’s music reveals his destructiveness and his nobility. And so it goes. Yes, there is some bombast here, yet it is bombast with a purpose—to evoke the empty pageantry of Claudius’s Elsinore, for example.

Yablonsky not only conducts this music passionately, he also plays it in its proper cinematic order. This is not true of Atovmian’s suite, in which the Players arrive after (!) they perform The Murder of Gonzago. As I suggested above, a few of the shorter cues are intrusive, but all in all, this CD is a satisfying listening experience, no matter what standard of judgment one uses.

Yablonsky is the son of pianist Oxana Yablonskaya, and he is accumulating quite a series of fine recordings for Naxos. Fine-sounding ones too, as the engineering is superb. Thirty years ago, who would have guessed that Russians would be making audiophile recordings in 2003? (I understand that there is an SACD version of this disc, too.)

If I had reviewed this disc a little earlier, I might have put it on my Want List for the year. The music, performances, and engineering are of the highest quality, and I can think of no better way to spend a leaden August (or November!) evening than to play this CD over and over again—which is exactly what I have done.

Raymond Tuttle, FANFARE

Click Here for the complete Naxos Film Music Classic Series

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The irresistible Boulanger Trio, composed of pianist Karla Haltenwanger, violinist Birgit Erz, and cellist Ilona Kindt have won a number of prizes worldwide and built an excellent reputation in the chamber music community. In addition to their traditional repertoire like the Shostakovich here presented, the Trio are in demand as interpreters of modern composers like Peteris Vasks, whose "Episodi e Canto perpetuo" grace this disc.

Shostakovich was still a young composer when he was hired to provide incidental music for The Bedbug, a surreal and farcical satire on Communist utopian dreams and bourgeois corruption and vulgarity. He produced a terrifically knockabout score that draws on local fireman’s bands and American dance music. Illustrated by Shostakovich’s powerful middle-period music, Love and Hate is a film about female fortitude set in a mining village during the 1919 Civil War. The innovative score, newly reconstructed by Mark Fitz-Gerald from rough piano sketches and the 1935 soundtrack, combines symphonic sections with popular songs.

This album is one of the most important symphonies by Shostakovich. This is the fifth Shostakovich release featuring the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart and Andrey Boreyko. Many considered it a "wonderful, passionate performance."

Shostakovich Performs, Vol. 1: Piano Quintet, Trio & Solos

Set in mid-nineteenth-century Italy during a turbulent period of pre-Unification political unrest, The Gadfly drew from Shostakovich one of his most dazzling and popular film scores, heard hitherto on record only in a suite arranged and reorchestrated by Levon Atovmian. This recording presents the full, original score for the first time, as closely as possible to shostakovich’s original conception. Reconstructed by Mark Fitz-Gerald from the original manuscript and the Russian film soundtrack, it calls for a large orchestra including church bells, an organ, two guitars and a mandolin, all excluded from the Atovmian suite. The excerpts from The Counterplan, which marked the fifteenth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution, include the infectious hit-tune The Song of the Counterplan.

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Listen to the Naxos Podcast to learn more about this release

Shostakovich’s two Piano Concertos span a period of almost thirty years. The youthful First Piano Concerto is a masterful example of eclecticism, its inscrutable humour and seriousness allied to virtuoso writing enhanced by the rôle for solo trumpet. Written as a birthday present for his son Maxim, the Second Piano Concerto is light-spirited with a hauntingly beautiful slow movement. With the permission of the composer’s family, Boris Giltburg has arranged the exceptionally dark, deeply personal and powerful String Quartet No. 8, thereby establishing a major Shostakovich solo piano composition.



REVIEWS:


We have no shortage of excellent versions of the two Shostakovich piano concertos, including Igoshina’s on CPO and Marc-André Hamelin’s on Hyperion. Here is another. These are big, bold, in-your-face performances that find a wider range of expression in both works than you might have believed possible. Much of the credit for this belongs to Vasily Petrenko as well, who continues his series of top-notch Shostakovich recordings for Naxos.

In the First Concerto, particularly the outer movements, Giltburg attacks the zany, theater music themes with unbridled ferocity, finding a bitter edge of desperation for all the music’s wackiness. The bright, up-front sonics and Rhys Owens’ piercing trumpet complement the approach, and there is also some remarkably precise ensemble playing from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic strings. It’s an exhausting cliff-hanger of a performance.

Giltburg and Petrenko’s vision of the theoretically light and easy Second Piano Concerto is even more striking. From the dry, perky winds at the start to the positively cataclysmic first movement development section, this is clearly a performance that has tremendous character–one which finds plenty of menace beneath the music’s breezy, sometimes comical, sometimes sweetly romantic exterior. It makes you sit up and listen with fresh ears, truly.

The two concertos really are two short for a single disc, and finding appropriate couplings is always an issue. This is where things get really interesting. Giltburg has made transcriptions of some of Shostakovich’s music for string quartet, the Waltz third movement from the Second Quartet, and the entire Eighth Quartet. He evidently had permission from Shostakovich’s family, which means nothing, as family members are usually terrible guardians of their illustrious ancestral legacies.

The Waltz works well enough, but the Eighth Quartet is an impossible piece to transcribe for the keyboard. This is string music, plain and simple. The sustained notes in the fourth movement simply cannot be reproduced on the piano, although with clever pedaling and a sensible tempo Giltburg almost pulls it off. The savage second movement sounds positively tame here: evidently it’s much easier to push a string quartet to its limits than it is a Fazioli.

Curiously, however, it’s impossible to call the performance as such a failure. It’s quite moving in its way, and if you know the original, either as a quartet or in its chamber symphony version, you can’t help but come away with a renewed appreciation of Shostakovich’s genius for matching the music to the (original) medium. But please, let’s not have any more of these experiments. One is more than enough. A great disc.

– ClassicsToday(David Hurwitz; 10/10)

Giltburg has all the agility, power and expressive intensity Shostakovich’s piano concertos demand, plus the temperament to negotiate their mercurial shifts of mood. Every phrase is imaginatively colored or nuanced, and never out of gimmicky point making, always because he has something worth saying. And he has found like-minded partners in the RLPO and Petrenko, who not only follow and support him superbly but also respond and provoke where appropriate.

– Gramophone

What is so appealing about this record is that the Boris Giltburg has rethought the works through the prism of the composer’s experiences. The first concerto is wonderfully skittish, a series of melodic in-jokes and exchanges with the orchestra. The second concerto, determinedly frisky, is played with a reckless to-hell-with-it abandon. With devastating precision, Giltburg has interpolated between the concertos his own piano reductions of one movement of the second string quartet and the entirety of the eight quartet, contemporaneous with the two piano concertos, exposing the composer’s seditious inner thoughts. This is a constantly illuminating, almost faultless project.

– Norman Lebrecht

Selections recorded at the Moscow State Broadcasting and
Grand Studio no 5, Recording House, Moscow, Russia.

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Classical Music

Ondine’s successful partnership with violinist Christian Tetzlaff continues with a new recording of Dmitri Shostakovich’s two Violin Concertos, personal, powerful yet distinctive works originally written for legendary Russian violinist David Oistrakh. Mr. Tetzlaff has been considered one of the world’s leading international violinists for many years, and still maintains a most extensive performing schedule. Musical America named him “Instrumentalist of the Year” in 2005. Previously released recordings on Ondine of the Mendelssohn and Schumann violin concertos, the Mozart Violin Sonatas and the Schumann Violin Sonatas have all received the highest critical praise. John Storgårds is today one of the most prominent Finnish conductors of his generation, known for his innovative and pioneering programming as Chief Conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic (2008–2015), Artistic Director of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra (1996–) and Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic (2012–). Mr. Storgårds also has several award-winning recordings with various orchestras to his credit,

• With this release Ondine presents two dramatic works by Dmitri Shostakovich, The Execution of Stepan Razin and the Zoya Suite, coupled with his Suite on Finnish Themes.
• The Execution of Stepan Razin, premiered in Moscow in 1964, got a mixed reception. The execution scene and the final, tragic vision is simply spine-chilling: Stepan Razin’s bloody head rolls to the ground and bursts out laughing at the Tsar. Capturing rich intonations and melodies of the text, the bass soloist and the chorus engage in a multi-layered dialogue of this very theatrical work.

}Gramophone (2/97, p. 58) "...DePreist gives us a pair of sensible, very well-prepared performances in good, albeit slightly studio-bound sound..."{