Shostakovich’s Fourth presents the elements that were to burst upon the Soviet scene in his next symphony, but without the Fifth’s tidier, simpler form, emotional...

Shostakovich’s Fourth presents the elements that were to burst upon the Soviet scene in his next symphony, but without the Fifth’s tidier, simpler form, emotional unity, and morally uplifting finale to act as a buffer between the composer and the Composer’s Union. The enormous first movement alone, lasting nearly a half-an-hour in performance, offers both delicately spectral and crudely overblown waltzes, lyrical recitatives of intense beauty, parodies of ceremonial marches and polkas, learned counterpoint, violently dissonant climaxes, gentle solos, and brass riding the percussion like the Czar’s galloping army carving down a field of peaceful protestors without mercy. This is Shostakovich come into his own full, focused symphonic power for the first time, and reveling in it.

To complaints of sectionalism, both in the first and final movements, Boreyko’s reply might well be, “Your point?” He doesn’t downplay any of it. Instead, he uses its often dissociative blocks of content to deliberately create juxtapositions that shock, moments of quiet melancholy followed by instrumental screams or taunts. It’s as if he were shouting (with Shostakovich) at the audience to pay closer attention, to consider each panel in the triptych of brutality, mockery, and sullenness that he’s placed upon display. When the time is right, nothing is held back, and this becomes among the most uninhibited of available Fourths. At other moments, Boreyko reminds me occasionally of Jansons (Avie 2096) in the silken beauty he coaxes from the Stuttgart strings. But where Jansons makes that sound an end in itself, this conductor uses it to better conjure those points of relative emotional stability that Shostakovich repeatedly creates, and quickly destroys.

If I have a criticism, it is that the Scherzo is too deadpan. The coarse sarcasm of the winds and brass are taken straight, and the dissonances in the subsequent string fugue are slightly downplayed. The conductor builds an impressive climax to the movement, but he clearly views it as an emotional intermission between two lengthy, harrowing events. While sympathetic to the need to interject some ray of hope into the proceedings, I don’t find that this treatment works especially well. In the coda to the third movement, certainly; and Boreyko makes something powerful out of the side glance Shostakovich takes there at Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. But the Scherzo requires something darker and more incisive, in my opinion.

The rest of the album is given over to a short three-movement orchestral suite drawn from the composer’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. It is described on the jewel box cover as the world premiere recording of the original version, but nowhere inside is this discussed; and it’s the same suite present on Deutsche Grammophon 650702, issued last year. I find these three tiny excerpts tell us far less about the work than the lengthier conductor-arranged suites of Conlon and Runnicles. Still, as filler goes, they make light-hearted listening. Boreyko makes more of the score’s spikiness than Thomas Sanderling, and the Stuttgart RSO runs rings around the Russian PO.

Despite my expressed reservations, Boreyko’s Fourth moves in among my favorites. There it joins Kondrashin/Moscow PO, Rozhdestvensky/Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, and Sinaisky/BBC PO, all currently out of print. I find it slightly superior to Gergiev/Kirov Orchestra (Philips 470 842), where momentum trumps detail, but these are matters of personal taste. Both treatments are in excellent sound, and either will do for the modern Shostakovich collector looking for a first-rate performance of this fascinating work.

-- Barry Brenesal, FANFARE [11/2007]