Includes work(s) by Dmitri Shostakovich. Ensemble: Moscow Chamber Orchestra. Conductor: Constantine Orbelian.

The best known of his chamber works, Dmitri Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet was something of a watershed, an outpouring of grief and rage full of supposedly autobiographical self-reference and quotation. Moscow Chamber Orchestra founder Rudolf Barshai received the composer's permission to recast the quartet as a string orchestra piece, and in this guise it is known as the Chamber Symphony Op. 110a. Now the orchestra's American born director Constantine Orbelian leads them in an appropriately dark-toned performance of this harrowing music, captured vividly by Delos at Skywalker Sound in California.
The Concerto for Piano and Strings of Alfred Schnittke is a more mysterious affair, with long, introspective piano monologues, placidly repeated triadic figures reminiscent of the 'Moonlight' Sonata placed against a background of melting string clusters, and the prominence of an emphatic three note scale motif. These rhetorical devices are placed in a kind of "night music" atmosphere, occasionally recalling the fantastic film scores of Bernard Herrmann.

This selection contains both DDD and ADD recordings.

The second disc of this set is a reading of Pushkin's original poem "The Gypsies", on which 'Aleko' is based. This poem is read in both English and Russian by Michael York and, respectively, Vassily Lanovoy.

Classical Music

Includes work(s) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Ensemble: Moscow Chamber Orchestra. Conductor: Rudolf Barshai. Soloist: Sviatoslav Richter.

It remains a cruel fact that Frank Bridge is still best known as the teacher of Benjamin Britten, and the composer of the theme on which Britten based one of the 20th century’s greatest compositions for string orchestra, the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. Cruel because Bridge is so obviously a highly individual voice in British music. But gradually Bridge is gaining the recognition he deserves, and here as proof is a disc from an American company by a Russian orchestra of some of Bridge’s own string music. Admittedly none of these works was originally written for string orchestra, but such is the skill of the various arrangements that they might well have been. And not all the music is on the level of invention of the so-called Chamber Concerto. This is an arrangement of Bridge’s early Piano Quintet, a powerful, searching work that gains in tensile strength from being played by a larger body of strings, particularly in this full-blooded, sinewy performance. No prissy Englishness here.

The rest of the programme is made up of youthful works, the Four Pieces a charming and highly skilful arrangement by that Bridge champion Paul Hindmarsh of juvenilia, and the Three Idylls, the middle one of which provided Britten with that memorable theme. Spirited performances, not always immaculately in tune; bright but slightly restricted recording. Explore and enjoy.

-- Adam Gatehouse, BBC Music Magazine