Shostakovich Symphonies

[Dave2002]

I think (and these are the ones I have, so if anyone knows of any other, I'd be pleased to hear) there are recordings (many of them "Live" recordings taken from different concerts) of Nos 5, 6, 8, 10, 11 & 15, Mario. I had thought he'd done No 9 and that I had the Disc, but, if so, I can't find it today!

I have very vague recollections of Antony Hopkins dealing with Shostakovich 5 many years ago, and I thought he'd used Mravinsky's recording. I remember the ending being very slow - rock steady - which gives a very different effect from some other ways of playing.

[Petrushka]

#50 ferneyhoughgeliebte, you beat me to it by a whisker! I have just been going through my recordings and came to the same conclusion, but can add one more: symphony 12. I cant actually answer Auferstehen2's question (#39) definitively, I've no idea how much of Mravinsky's total recorded output (which is very large) I have acquired over the years, but probably only a small fraction. Of the Shostakovich symphonies, I have:

5 Russian Melodiya LP
6 English HMV/Melodiya and CD BMG Mravinsky edition vol. 9
8 CD BMG Mravinksy edition vol. 17
10 CD BMG Mravinsky edition vol. 9
11 Russian Melodiya LP
12 English HMV/Melodiya LP
15 CD BMG Mravinsky edition vol. 3

I dont know how far the BMG Mravinsky edition went, but vol. 17 lists vols. 1 - 20, giving only the composers featured, not their works. Apart from vols. 3, 9 and 17 already mentioned, there are works by Shostakovich listed on vols. 15 and 16: anyone know what they are?

Looking through my discs of the symphonies, I am impressed by the roster of conductors. A fine list of the great, good, neglected and utterly unknown. Apart from the central cast of Kondrashin, Mravinsky, Svetlanov, Haitink, Ormandy, there are recordings by (in no particular order):

Previn, Bernstein, Ancerl, Stokowski, Golschmann, Slovak, Blazhkov, Rozhdestvensky, Gould, Mitropoulos, Silvestri, Rowicki, Skrowaczewski, Neumann, Berglund, Nekludov, Karajan, Kurz, Cluytens, Pretre, Rostropovich, Barshai and Maxim Shostakovich.

This may just reflect the limitations of my knowledge rather than their tastes, but there are some names there that I would not associate with Shostakovich: Cluytens, Karajan, Berglund, for example, each in just one symphony. Not so surprising that Karajan would pick the tenth, because it is among the most popular, but why Berglund should pick the seventh, or Cluytens the eleventh, seems to me to be a bit of mystery.

Volume 16 of the BMG Mravinsky Edition is the 1953 Leningrad. Berglund also recorded the 11th and 8th and performed the 5th at the Proms in 1975.

One other Mravinsky recording of the 5th so far unmentioned is the 1938 Leningrad PO version now on the Doh-Re-Mi label. Not surprisingly, the sound is a bit ropey but no DSCH enthusiast should be without it.

[Petrushka]

Petrushka jogged my memory - the first orchestral concert I ever attended was DSCH 8 with the RLPO conducted by Maxim Shostakovich, I've just found the ticket dated September 21st 1974.

After that I ransacked the local record library for all those Melodiyas... I noticed back then that hardly anyone else ever borrowed DSCH at all!

Pre-1979 I rather think that DSCH was seen more in the West as a tool of the Communist Party and his music not taken particularly seriously but the publication of Testimony changed all that. I recall picking up quite a few Melodiya LP's in Collets in Charing Cross Road in the 1970's.

It just so happened that I visited Moscow in 1979 just a short time after the Testimony storm broke and on a trip to Novodevichy Convent I asked to see Shostakovich's grave but the Intourist (aka KGB) Guide refused to allow it. There was a lot of sensitivity about Shostakovich at that time.

I went to one of the first concerts that Maxim gave after his defection in 1981 and was lucky enough to meet him and his son (also Dmitri) after the concert. Heady days!

[johnb]

Pre-1979 I rather think that DSCH was seen more in the West as a tool of the Communist Party and his music not taken particularly seriously but the publication of Testimony changed all that.

Sure, Soviet Russia tried to use Shostakovich in its propaganda (especially after he joined the party, late in life) but (and this is a bloody big 'but') nobody who seriously listened to his music could have any doubt about his real views - Testimony or no Testimony.

[johnb]

Is there any agreement on how the last movement of the Fifth should be performed? Is it a triumphal finale, or a parody of a triumphal finale?

The first recording I heard was the Karel Ancerl version on MfP, which plays it straight. I never felt the finale sat well with the rest of the work in that version. Some of the more ironic interpretations I've heard have seemed to work a lot better, but I'm sure I remember hearing on a BaL on the Fifth that some of them only achieved their effect by deviating quite a bit from the tempi and dynamics indicated in the score.

From what I remember from a course I attended many years ago, the closing section of the score was originally at the slower tempo - but was then reprinted with that tempo effectively doubled. (I have always felt that the 5th is fundamentally a deeply tragic work with a 'get-out-of-jail' finale.) Incidentally Rostropovich, who was a friend of Shostakovich always used the slower tempo for the closing section.

[Chris Newman]

From what I remember from a course I attended many years ago, the closing section of the score was originally at the slower tempo - but were then reprinted with that tempo effectively doubled. (I have always felt that the 5th is fundamentally a deeply tragic work with a 'get-out-of-jail' finale.) Incidentally Rostropovich, who was a friend of Shostakovich always used the slower tempo for the closing section.

So did Maxim Shostakovich when I heard him conduct the 5th with the Prague Symphony Orchestra in Prague.

[ahinton]

So did Maxim Shostakovich when I heard him conduct the 5th with the Prague Symphony Orchestra in Prague.

I'm aware of this and of MR's take on it and wonder whether these might have been intended as expressions of some kind of double irony; be that as it may, the music of that coda itself is imbued with a kind of hollowness that bears, for me at least, an uncomfortably striking resemblance in spirit to the way in which the composer closes his later (and in general terms far weaker) symphony in the same key...

[Chris Newman]

I am intrigued by DSCH's half dozen false codas in the 12th. I am sure that he wrote the main body of the work to please the Party which he had joined at about the same time (probably to get them off his back and give him breathing space to compose) but to my ears the end of the finale makes a complete joke of triumphalism (as you say, Alistair, resembling the fifth in that respect, only much more vulgarly). I really suspect he enjoyed watching those stiff ram-rod green and red uniforms and grey suits preparing to clap politely as each coda reached its apparent culmination followed by the hands gingerly subsiding back to rest on the knees in anticlimax as the next orchestral onslaught began. It is feeble music but I enjoy the picture it makes. It might have fooled (or merely puzzled) the powers-that-be but at a Hoffnung Concert would have brought the house down with laughter.

Whether Volkov's book is genuine or not we shall probably never know though I think most agree that DSCH thought along those lines. I wish Rhozdezvensky and Temirkanov would let us know what they know. I cannot believe they were apparatchiks like Svetlanov.

[Alf-Prufrock]

Which Japanese set was this, AP? I bought the Aulos remaster (Korean, I think) and then the latest Melodiya one from 2006 - they're both stunningly better than the original LPs or CDs.

It's worth emphasising to anyone starting to listen to Shostakovich that certain Russian performers will tell you things no-one else can. Kondrashin in the symphonies, and the Borodins in the String Quartets, produce a style of performance - phrasing, nuances of emotion, and a dark, haunting, sometimes demonic character to their tonal colours, that expresses an essential, very slav, very Russian quality in this music; the humour never far from sarcasm, the tragic passages veering from bleakness, to apocalyptic, to mordant black comedy.

Listen to Kondrashin's 4th to hear what I mean...

I have the Melodiya set. As you say, they are a vast improvement over the LPs. I have never heard the Aulos set.

Your description of the Kondrashin effect is spot on - thank you for that.

[johnb]

I am sure that he wrote the main body of the work to please the Party which he had joined at about the same time (probably to get them off his back and give him breathing space to compose)....

The lecturer on a course I attended (the inspirational John Pickard) pointed out that the 12th and 13th have consecutive opus numbers - so perhaps the 12th was designed to give him the latitude for the excoriating 13th.

He did, I believe, compose an arrangement of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death between the two works but didn't allocate an opus number to it. Although the previous and subsequent orchestrations he did both had opus numbers.

Coincidence? Or was he sending a signal?

[BBMmk2]

As always with DS, he sends out different signals. At times, it is quite difficult to pin them down. For example, as someone said earlier, re the finale of the 5th.

[Petrushka]

When I first got to know Shostakovich's music in the 1970's I really found it quite difficult to equate the usual commentaries that appeared with that of the music itself particularly the finales of the 5th and 7th. Once Testimony appeared everything became clearer. Whether genuine or not, I have no means of knowing, but it certainly feels as if it is to me. I believe that both Rostropovich and the composer's son, Maxim were convinced and that's good enough for me.

Anyway, Jayne Lee Wilson has persuaded me to spend £50+ on the 2006 remastering of the Kondrashin set - which I paid £70 for in its previous incarnation! JLW has missed her vocation and should be selling ice cream to Eskimos!

[jayne lee wilson]

Don't forget the Aulos remaster of the Taneyev Quartet's DSCH Complete String Quartets, Petrushka, I'm SURE you'll want that too, I mean, just for completeness sake of course...

Well yes, it does happen to be the best, even with the lugubrious Borodins around, but don't let me tempt you, do watch those pennies now...

When I first got to know Shostakovich's music in the 1970's I really found it quite difficult to equate the usual commentaries that appeared with that of the music itself particularly the finales of the 5th and 7th. Once Testimony appeared everything became clearer. Whether genuine or not, I have no means of knowing, but it certainly feels as if it is to me. I believe that both Rostropovich and the composer's son, Maxim were convinced and that's good enough for me.

Anyway, Jayne Lee Wilson has persuaded me to spend £50+ on the 2006 remastering of the Kondrashin set - which I paid £70 for in its previous incarnation! JLW has missed her vocation and should be selling ice cream to Eskimos!

[jayne lee wilson]

If my ears don't deceive me, (doubtless a more frequent occurrence the wrong side of 50) after close comparisons I'd say that despite the later date for the stereo 4th given in the 2006 Melodiya remaster box, there's only one performance here; aulos stereo, melodiya stereo, melodiya mono - I think they are all the same. Looking around online for those who've heard at least 2 of them there does seem to be some consensus about it.

Which makes the Dresden Mono and the Amsterdam Stereo performances even more significant.
Better make time for hearing that Concertgebouw one again... but, busy days!

Still, going to Petrenko's Leningrad in Liverpool soon - more than a little apprehensive!

#67 Mahlerei, it may be even more complicated. I've got two LP versions of the 4th conducted by Kondrashin: one is with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra and is on HMV/Melodiya, ASD 2741 and the other is with the Symphony Orchestra of the Moscow Philharmonic Society, on a russian 2 disc set, MK C 0295-298(a) with the Hamlet Suite as a filler. Unless those are the same orchestra moonlighting under two different names, which I gather is not unheard of, that makes two Moscow recordings plus a third from Dresden (which I dont have).

I've also recordings by Ormandy/Philadelphia O. (claimed to be "American Recording Premiere"), Haitink/LPO and Previn/Chicago SO. I wouldnt willingly part with any of them, but recall that the Previn was particularly good (and his version of the fifth, with the LSO, is pretty vivid, too).

[BBMmk2]

I should think Petrenko's 'Leningrad', would be just up his street? Why the aprehension?