Dmitri's Dacha

Started by karlhenning, April 09, 2007, 08:13:49 AM

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Brahmsian

Now onto the dark Symphony No. 13 in B flat minor, Op. 113 "Babi Yar"


Brahmsian

Quote from: ultralinear on April 13, 2021, 07:21:20 AM
Oh yes - I played that the other day along with about a dozen others, and thought it terrific. :)

That is a lot of Shostakovich 1!  :)

Do you have some favourites?  In your mind, which performance has the most alarming, prominent fortissimo timpani passage in that final movement?

Roasted Swan

Quote from: ultralinear on April 13, 2021, 08:45:50 AM
Until recently I would immediately have said Kondrashin/Moscow - having always been a bit of a Kondrashin fan :D - and I still like that a lot - but I really was very struck by how good that Barshai is.  Maybe because that set seems to have been around forever, it is easy to overlook - but I thought it pretty much faultless, and not at all mannered.  It probably helps that it's also one of the quickest. :-\

It's easier to say which is the most disappointing - and sadly, it's my most recent purchase  :'( :

Heavy-footed and frequently dragging, it seems a lot slower than it actually is, and does the music no favours.

If I could only have one recording, nowadays - and not for the first time - it would have to be Sladkovsky/Tatarstan:

This set has upended a number of my previously-held opinions and preferences when it comes to Shostakovich performance, and is quite superb.  I am lost in admiration for it.

However, for sheer bonkers timpani-bashing, nothing I know beats Rozhdestvensky/USSR Ministry of Culture:

Or even comes close.  I have a later (live) recording of him conducting the Dresden Staatskapelle - very slowly ??? - and the the timps there are much more reasonable. :(

I like the description of bonkers timpani-bashing!  Do you know the live Rohzdestvensky from this set;



Off-hand (and I don't have it to hand) I can't remember the timpani status in No.1!  The performance there I DO remember is the Scherzo in No.10 when it sounds like the side-drummer falls through his drum - hilarious chaos ensues

Brahmsian

Quote from: ultralinear on April 13, 2021, 08:45:50 AM
Until recently I would immediately have said Kondrashin/Moscow - having always been a bit of a Kondrashin fan :D - and I still like that a lot - but I really was very struck by how good that Barshai is.  Maybe because that set seems to have been around forever, it is easy to overlook - but I thought it pretty much faultless, and not at all mannered.  It probably helps that it's also one of the quickest. :-\

It's easier to say which is the most disappointing - and sadly, it's my most recent purchase  :'( :

Heavy-footed and frequently dragging, it seems a lot slower than it actually is, and does the music no favours.

If I could only have one recording, nowadays - and not for the first time - it would have to be Sladkovsky/Tatarstan:

This set has upended a number of my previously-held opinions and preferences when it comes to Shostakovich performance, and is quite superb.  I am lost in admiration for it.

However, for sheer bonkers timpani-bashing, nothing I know beats Rozhdestvensky/USSR Ministry of Culture:

Or even comes close.  I have a later (live) recording of him conducting the Dresden Staatskapelle - very slowly ??? - and the the timps there are much more reasonable. :(

Thanks for that thoughtful and thorough review, Ultra!  :)  I will have to check out the Roz 1st at some point.  :D

Roasted Swan

Quote from: ultralinear on April 13, 2021, 09:31:57 AM
Bloody hell.

I had completely forgotten that I have - not that set - but this one:

Which includes live recordings of 1, 4, 7, 9, 10.

I must have listened to these at some point (surely?) but retain no memory, and never ripped them to the library either.  What an idiot (smacks head.)

Well that's my evening sorted then. ::) ;D

Yes its the 10 disc set I have too.  Just listening to the the finale of DSCH 1 as I write this.  Fraught is the word that springs to mind - this sort of performance brings to mind that sporting cliche - "leaving everything out on the pitch".  Absolutely no prisoners and yes those timps are most certainly thwacked.  Perhaps it was because I grew up on those old Melodiya recordings and I remember seeing the Soviet orchestras when they toured to the UK but this IS the sound I have in my inner ear as being 'right' for this sort of music.  The thing is behind the crudity of some the actual sound these performances are really well paced and genuinely thrilling.  I can imagine being at the actual concerts was extraordinarily cathartic.

Just listened to the No.10 Scherzo to remind myself of the chaos, the sidedrummer misses his first big entry (its the Siberian Symphony Orchestra for him) and then drops his sticks right at the end of the movement but God its exciting!

JBS

Quote from: ultralinear on April 13, 2021, 09:31:57 AM
Bloody hell.

I had completely forgotten that I have - not that set - but this one:

Which includes live recordings of 1, 4, 7, 9, 10.

I must have listened to these at some point (surely?) but retain no memory, and never ripped them to the library either.  What an idiot (smacks head.)

Well that's my evening sorted then. ::) ;D

I have that set as well. I remember the sonics to be extremely variable and that the non-Shostakovich recordings were more interesting. (In fact they made the set worth getting no matter what your opinion of the Shostakivich performances might be.)

Hollywood Beach Broadwalk

Roasted Swan

#2506
Quote from: ultralinear on April 14, 2021, 04:05:25 AM
That side-drummer is delightful.  What a life-enhancing moment that must have been for everyone present. ;D

One time I saw Jansons conduct the Bavarian RSO (in Mahler, I think) - and he was just raising the baton to start, when one of the percussionists signalled frantically to him and then ran off the platform (none too quietly) - leaving Jansons standing there with his arms folded, and everyone else talking quietly - to reappear a couple of minutes later, breathlessly holding aloft the triangle he had forgotten.  He got an especially enthusiastic cheer, both then and at the end.

God how I miss going to concerts. :(

I am in two minds about that live 1st.  The unbalanced sound gives prominence to the upper strings and woodwind, with everyone else (especially the piano) recessed to varying degrees and creating a shrill effect overall.  Together with sometimes rather hectic activity, it does play into the hands of those who would dismiss this as circus music.

OTOH that very abrasiveness - together with the echt Soviet brass sound - does give this recording an authenticity which more polished productions can dilute.  And there is some impressive wristwork on the tympani. ;)

Sadly my CD of the 4th had a deep scratch across it which took most of the evening to polish out until I got a decent transfer (AutoGlym saves the day again) so I haven't had a chance to hear it yet.  It has stiff competition from 3 other Rozhdestvensky recordings, all of them terrific - particularly this live one with the Philharmonia:

Despite the audience of emphysema patients. ::) ;D

+1 for everything you say.  I must admit I love the wildness of the performance - something that lives in the moment of its creation and is not trying to be a "library version" by anyone.  Sometimes things just have to be allowed to live in that instant.  Of course, the paradox is that we are discussing a recording of that instant but I think it changes the mindset of the performers.  The thing I always used to find fascinating about the old Soviet orchestras toruing the UK was they always looked so miserable and immobile taking the applause.  BUT, once the playing started they were electric!  I also liked the way with Rozhdestvensky how he was so minimalist on the podium with the tiniest gesture producing an explosion from the orchestra.......

vandermolen

Quote from: Roasted Swan on April 13, 2021, 09:03:55 AM
I like the description of bonkers timpani-bashing!  Do you know the live Rohzdestvensky from this set;



Off-hand (and I don't have it to hand) I can't remember the timpani status in No.1!  The performance there I DO remember is the Scherzo in No.10 when it sounds like the side-drummer falls through his drum - hilarious chaos ensues
I need to get that performance of Symphony 10!
I wonder it is as much fun as the 'Dr Phibes' organ solo in Rozhdestvensky's recording of Vaughan Williams's 'Sinfonia Antartica'.
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

aukhawk

Quote from: Roasted Swan on April 14, 2021, 04:14:36 AM
... I also liked the way with Rozhdestvensky how he was so minimalist on the podium with the tiniest gesture producing an explosion from the orchestra.......

Strangely, my abiding memory of Rozhdestvensky (I saw him conducting the Leningrad PO in the RAH - a prom concert) was a burst of exhibitionism as he milked the applause after a Tchaikovsky symphony - he bounded up onto the podium with chest puffed and arms outstretched, to cheers and stamping applause (well it was a prom).

Cato

An essay by Kenneth Lafave in The Epoch Times about the Fifth Symphony:


QuoteOn Jan. 28, 1936, Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich picked up a copy of the newspaper Pravda and found that he had been labeled anathema to the USSR.

Shostakovich's 1934 opera, "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District," was "cacophonous" and "an insult to Soviet women," Pravda claimed. His ballet of the same year, "The Limpid Stream," was "infected with cynicism." If Comrade Shostakovich did not change his ways, the article concluded, "things could end badly."

Shostakovich had been handed a public threat at the direction of Joseph Stalin. His capital crime: "formalism." Of course, no one knew what constituted "formalism" anymore than anyone knew what made someone a "right-winger." All that was known for certain was that a formalist was an artist disliked by Stalin, just as a right-winger was anybody Stalin wanted dead.

What followed constitutes one of the greatest controversies in the history of Western music. Shostakovich either acquiesced to Stalin's demands, or he pulled off an artistic sleight of hand unparalleled in history.

The piece Shostakovich had originally planned as his next opus was a mammoth, complex sonic structure he called Symphony No. 4, a score that consciously turned away from socialist realism, the officially optimistic, quasi-heroic aesthetic of Stalin's USSR.

The music of socialist realism was expected to be squarely optimistic for the future of the State, eschewing "negative" elements from the bourgeois past. By contrast, Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4 was tumultuous, mercurial, and sardonic. After the Pravda article, Shostakovich thought it best to withdraw the work.

Rather than invite further attacks, he came up with a cunning way to deal with his demagogic critics. He would compose a symphony that had all the elements of socialist realism, thus avoiding the gulag. But such general terms as "optimism" and "heroism," mainstays of the socialist realist aesthetic, were open to interpretation. In a musical work lacking words or visuals, the identity of a hero was not a given, and "optimism" has many shades of meaning.

Shostakovich would write a symphony seemingly aligned with socialist realism, but in actuality critical of it and of the Soviet Union itself. A tall order, but one within the capabilities of a young genius whose first symphony had put him on the musical map at age 19.

This, at least, was what Shostakovich accomplished according to many observers. But to mainstream Marxists, the work Shostakovich produced after his dressing-down from Pravda really was what it claimed to be on the official subtitle of the printed score: "A Soviet artist's response to just criticism."


The work at controversy is Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47. Listen and decide for yourself. The first movement opens Moderato with menacing, dotted-rhythm gestures in the strings countered by a plaintive theme from the first violins. The stage is set for a great struggle, which culminates in an Allegro non troppo dominated by aggressive writing and, ultimately, a sense of defeat.

The second movement is a scherzo of unbridled physical exuberance. It is the only truly "heroic" music of the piece, and yet ... Are the scherzo's militaristic rhythms and brass salvos truly heroic, or are they merely the strident exterior of heroism, a brilliant but vapid show of force?

And then, the emotional core of the symphony: a Largo of such deeply felt tragedy that members of the audience at the premiere in Leningrad, on Nov. 21, 1937, wept in open defiance of the Soviet edict that condemned tragedy as counterrevolutionary.

In his book "The New Shostakovich," Ian McDonald writes: "The commonest reaction the Fifth seems to have called from contemporary Russian listeners was simple relief at hearing tragic emotion expressed during a time when genuine feeling was being systematically destroyed by the Terror." Shostakovich composed the movement in the weeks following the execution of one of his teachers.

The finale, averred by Shostakovich in official statements attributed to him to represent the triumph of the optimistic socialist State over the Largo's inexorable tragedy, was, ironically, precisely that. Only, consider: What has triumphed? The imposition of an impersonal ethos over the inner lives of individuals. Authentic feeling has been replaced by robotic "happiness."

As the Shostakovich of author Solomon Volkov's "Testimony," published after the composer's death, said of it: "The rejoicing is forced, created under threat. ... It's as if someone were beating you with a stick saying, 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing.'"

The official Soviet culture machine heard what it wanted to hear and proclaimed the symphony a masterpiece of socialist realism. Strangely, we can agree. For anyone with ears to hear, Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 expresses life under Stalin with hair-raising accuracy.

Former music critic for the Arizona Republic and The Kansas City Star, Kenneth LaFave recently earned a doctorate in philosophy, art, and critical thought from the European Graduate School. He is the author of three books, including "Experiencing Film Music
" (2017, Rowman & Littlefield).

"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

Cato

Quote from: ultralinear on April 15, 2021, 04:22:20 AM
One of the joys of that symphony is the room it leaves for interpretation.  One I recall particularly was Tugan Sokhiev conducting (I think) the Philharmonia in just about the most sarcastic Finale imaginable, would have come as a shock to anyone expecting something celebratory.

Very interesting!  The performance is available only to subscribers: ($12.99 a month) on Medici.tv.

https://www.medici.tv/en/concerts/tugan-sokhiev-conducts-chen-and-shostakovich-edgar-moreau/?preview=199941?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=teaser&utm_campaign=20181127_edgarmoreau

Excerpts are available on YouTube.
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

Brahmsian

Quote from: Cato on April 15, 2021, 04:45:20 AM
Very interesting!  The performance is available only to subscribers: ($12.99 a month) on Medici.tv.

https://www.medici.tv/en/concerts/tugan-sokhiev-conducts-chen-and-shostakovich-edgar-moreau/?preview=199941?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=teaser&utm_campaign=20181127_edgarmoreau

Excerpts are available on YouTube.

I was a subscriber of Medici for about a year.  A fairly decent site for viewing concert performances and several documentaries.  Unfortunately, one drawback I found is that several of their videos did not have the translation or subtitles for English.  :-\

Cato

Courtesy of a FaceBook comment:




Van Cliburn meeting Shostakovich: probably during the time of the former's award-winning performance at the Tchaikovsky Competition.


Can you believe it?  Van Cliburn was given a New-York-City Ticker-Tape Parade!  Of course, The Cold War was the common denominator of many such things!  Today, would such a parade take place? ;) ;)

"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

Leo K.

Shosty's song cycles with orchestra are really getting to me. They are AMAZING. This is the set I'm listening to:




Mirror Image

Quote from: Leo K. on April 20, 2021, 07:00:59 AM
Shosty's song cycles with orchestra are really getting to me. They are AMAZING. This is the set I'm listening to:



Yes, I recall enjoying them, too. I have these two recordings, which I believe are in that box set:



There's also some of them in the Rozhdestvensky set I own of the symphonies on Melodiya.

Karl Henning

Quote from: Leo K. on April 20, 2021, 07:00:59 AM
Shosty's song cycles with orchestra are really getting to me. They are AMAZING. This is the set I'm listening to:





Very nice!
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

Madiel

Quote from: Mirror Image on April 20, 2021, 07:44:46 AM
Yes, I recall enjoying them, too. I have these two recordings, which I believe are in that box set:



There's also some of them in the Rozhdestvensky set I own of the symphonies on Melodiya.

I have the same 2 albums, various reviews pointed to them as the best choice and there's definitely some excellent singing.

Of course, it's worth noting that many (but not all) of the 'orchestral' song cycles were originally conceived for piano. For some the piano and orchestral versions were more or less simultaneous.
I am now working on a discography of the works of Vagn Holmboe. Please visit and also contribute!

Mirror Image

Quote from: Madiel on April 21, 2021, 02:21:32 AM
I have the same 2 albums, various reviews pointed to them as the best choice and there's definitely some excellent singing.

Of course, it's worth noting that many (but not all) of the 'orchestral' song cycles were originally conceived for piano. For some the piano and orchestral versions were more or less simultaneous.

Yeah, I haven't ventured into Shostakovich's songs for voice and piano yet. I should rectify this at some point.

Roasted Swan

Partly prompted by the talk about Rozhdestvensky's live performances I revisited some of his USSR Ministry of Culture SO performances as released on the late-lamented Olympia



He makes a very powerful case for the Leningrad - all snarling Soviet brass and jackbooted snare-drums.  Subtle it ain't but then neither is the work.  This is a symphony as agit-prop and as such it succeeds gloriously

Alek Hidell

Quote from: Scion7 on September 25, 2020, 11:15:13 AM


not the best version in existence, especially the 2nd movement, but has a fast tempo that makes it different - if perhaps inappropriate ...

This was a few months ago, but I was catching up in this thread and noticed it. Interesting (and prominent) typo there: the Fifth is not Shostakovich's Op.41. It's Op.47 ...

Anyway, listening to the 8th from this:



I've had my eye on this (ongoing?) cycle and thought I should sample it.
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist." - Hélder Pessoa Câmara