A worthwhile Shostakovich grab-bag

Shostakovich: Chamber Symphony, String Quartets, Piano Music

This new 4-CD set coming on June 6, 2025 consists of recordings made by Capriccio and BR Klassik in the period 2004-06. There's a lot of music here - about four hours altogether - and it's definitely a worthwhile purchase, at a bargain price.

Here are the complete contents of the set:

The first CD includes some works from this 2004 CD from Capriccio, namely Rudolph Barshai's version of the 8th String Quartet for String Orchestra, the Prelude and Scherzo, op. 11, and Alfred Schnittke's Prelude in Memory of Dimitri Shostakovich. These are all marvellous works, and good performances. The Schnittke piece is especially moving, and a valuable addendum to such a large compendium of Shostakovich's music.

As well, the first disc includes Lena Auerbach's arrangement of the Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, op. 143, from a 2006 CD. These are poignant poems sung by soprano Zoryana Kushpler, with comments from a string quartet, here the Petersen String Quartet of Berlin, sometimes pithy, sometimes full of compassion.

Here's the original Capriccio BR Klassik album cover for the Piano Quintet and two String Quartets on CD 2, from 2005:

There's a lot of music to review here, and I've only listened all the way through once. But I like what I've heard so far. Of course, with the String Quartets, the bar is set very high, by groups like the Borodin Quartet, the Fitzwilliam Quartet, the Brodsky Quartet, and my favourite, the Pacifica Quartet. The Petersen Quartet don't give us the total experience that these intense readings provide, but these are more than passable interpretations. Their relaxed approach is perhaps better matched to Shostakovich's fraught 4th Quartet than to the spring-like First, which flags at times rather than flowing freely.

The Piano Quintet is most probably the greatest work in this set, with the most daunting recording competition. There are 70 recordings on Apple Classical; my favourites are Sviatoslav Richter with the Borodin Quartet, Marc-André Hamelin with the Takács Quartet, and Martha Argerich with Maisky, Margulis, Capuçon & Chen. Ewa Kupiec and the Petersen Quartet provide a fine performance here, though perhaps not in the same league as these.

CDs 3 and 4 are filled with music for one and two pianos, played by Margarete Babinsky and Holger Busch, originally released on this 2-CD set from 2006:

I love Shostakovich's music for solo piano, most especially his great set of Preludes and Fugues, op. 87, from 1950/51. His 24 Preludes, op. 34, recorded here by Margarete Babinsky, are from 1932, and are as indebted to Chopin as his Preludes & Fugues are to Bach. The composer's shifting moods and his use of mock heroism, sarcasm and parody give the performer lots of room for interpretation, and I generally like Babinsky's choices here. Of course she doesn't bring the same authenticity to Shostakovich's piano music that Tatiana Nikolayeva does, but there is no single right way to play this music. And Babinsky has considerable technique, though her 36-second version of the Fifth Prelude doesn't go quite as hard or as fast as some I've heard. Andrey Gugnin's 2019 recording on Hyperion probably wins that particular competition, though I don't condone drag races on piano keyboards. (19 seconds, but who's counting?)

I was likewise impressed with both of Babinsky's versions of the two Piano Sonatas, the 1st from 1926-27, and the 2nd from 1943.  The First provides a portrayal of the October Revolution of 1917 unfiltered by the Soviet Realism of Shostakovich's October Symphony, his no. 2. It's powerful music, capably communicated by Babinsky. The Second is also impressive, especially the remarkable theme and variations of the third movement, which the pianist builds with Hitchcockian suspense.

Shostakovich wrote his Concertino for Two Pianos for his teenage son Maxim to play with a fellow student, and there's a very pleasant family feeling to the piece. Margarete Babinsky and Holger Busch don't make too big a meal of this work; there's lots of drama here, but I don't think the stakes are especially high. A fun piece!

So this has been a pretty rapid tour of a big chunk of the much, much bigger chunk of music Shostakovich wrote in almost every genre, over a working life of five decades. Though none of these performances is in the top rank, they're all better than average, and some considerably better. Thanks to Capriccio and BR Klassik for this compilation!

Music from a year of crisis

1923: music by Bartok, Krenek, Toch & Weill

The year 1923 was a year of crisis in Germany; inflation was heating up and far right-wing parties were jockeying for power. In October, the first broadcast of public radio in Germany took place from the "Berliner Funkstunde" station on Potsdamer Platz. This provocative new disc from the Choir and Symphony of Bavarian Radio includes four works written a hundred years ago by a group of innovative composers who all made use of the new, disruptive technology of radio.

Kurt Weill's Frauentanz is a suite of seven medieval songs, scored for soprano, flute, viola, clarinet, horn and bassoon. Weill helped to create the familiar soundtrack for Weimar Berlin, and this performance by Anna-Maria Palii and the fine instrumentalists of the Bayerischen Rundfunks orchestra provides the authentic feel of a society that was becoming increasingly decadent and hysterical in 1923 and beyond.

Ernst Toch's Dance Suite is another clever and imaginative piece with interesting orchestration: flute, clarinet, violin, viola, double bass and percussion. The Berlin sound is also evident here, something a bit harsh and raw, in contrast with the softer-focussed, more lyrical and pastoral modernism of Paris.

The Ernst Krenek work is a bit of a surprise: his 3 Choruses for a cappella choir . The 'antique' sound of these pieces remind me of two of my favourite works: Vaughan Williams' G minor Mass, from 1921, and Heitor Villa-Lobos's Missa São Sebastião, from 1937. All three provide old wine in new bottles: ancient cadences with a modernist twist.

The final work on the disc is probably the best known: Bela Bartok's Dance Suite for Orchestra. This is an orchestral showpiece, a kind of try-out for his Concerto for Orchestra written more than two decades later. Both pieces treat orchestral instruments in a solistic, virtuosic way. The source material might be folkloric, but this is definitely written in a modernist idiom.

Inflation, far right-wing agitation, disruptive technology: yes, we're talking about 1923, not 2023. And the music on this disc is as fresh and forward-looking as some of the best music written today.

 

Tranquility of Touch or Intensity of Thought

Anton Bruckner: Symphony no. 8

In this majestic but deeply human performance, recorded live in November 2017 at Munich's Philharmonie im Gasteig, Mariss Jansons and his Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks make a strong case for putting this work close to the top of all 19th Century symphonies. "My Eighth is a mystery," said Bruckner, and when he presented it to conductor Hermann Levi in 1887 it seemed an impenetrable one. After significant changes from the composer, it received its premiere in 1890, but its vastness and complexity were still a challenge. The mystery of the Eighth has been illuminated from time to time, by conductors such as Barbirolli, Karajan, Klemperer and Tennstedt (a favourite of mine), but perhaps each misses out on at least as much as it exposes.

Anton Bruckner's naive and mild manner and his obsequiousness in the face of his idol Richard Wagner (memorably illustrated in this silhouette by Otto Böhler) gives one the wrong idea of what to expect from this work. His 8th Symphony has all of the power and mystery and sensuousness of Wagner's Ring, set in a meticulously designed architecture. Most importantly, it tests the limits of Wagner's musical world, well before the future experiments of Debussy, Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

"Today, says Tom Service, "Bruckner's Eighth should still be controversial. This is a piece that is attempting something so extraordinary that if you're not prepared to encounter its expressive demons, or to be shocked and awed by the places Bruckner's imagination takes you, then you're missing out on the essential experience of the symphony." This amazing insight goes to the heart of my concern about Jansons' highly humanistic interpretation, with consolation the keynote rather than pain. There is sorrow enough in the dark passages, of course, and power in the beautiful brass fanfares, but always the light shines through. I hesitate to complain about so beatific a performance, since I think today's world needs this as much as it needs anything. But the Masterpiece has its own needs.

Here, from a performance later that month in Brussels, is a lovely excerpt from the Symphony that illustrates Jansons' authority as well as his great charm and humanity.



I've been reading Nick Hunt's marvellous book Where The Wild Winds Are: Walking the Winds from the Pennines to Provence. At the beginning of his quest to experience the Mistral winds in the South of France, he quotes a letter from Vincent Van Gogh: "Aren't we seeking intensity of thought rather than tranquillity of touch?" Van Gogh's answer is clear, but Bruckner, I think, needs some of both.

This disc will be released on June 8, 2018.

The playfully profound music of Friedrich Gulda

Gulda Plays Mozart & Gulda

Improvisation is a process, according to Mike Nichols, that “absorbs you, creates you, and saves you.” In a superb in-depth New Yorker article about Nichols, John Lahr digs into his concept of improvisation. A lesson Nichols the director learned from his improv work with Elaine May was this: "To damn well pick something that would happen in the scene—an Event." Nichols goes on:

While you’re expressing what happens, you’re also saying underneath, ‘Do we share this? Are you like me in any way? Oh, look, you are. You laughed!

That improv helped Nichols in his directing day-job is clear; it's also clear that it's a vital part of every classical musician's toolkit. This is about more than cadenzas and adding ornamentation in repeats; it's built in to the very DNA of both interpretation and composition. Mozart was a great improviser, as was Bach. The appreciation for Friedrich Gulda's genius, which has only grown since his death in 2000, is based to a large part on the unexpected places he takes us in the core repertoire of the piano. I recently listened straight through to the six CDs of his Complete Mozart Tapes, and was struck by how fresh and alive every single sonata sounded. Each movement was, in Nichols' sense, an Event.

This CD from BR Klassik, due to be released on June 2, 2017, comes from two live concerts. The first, from 2009, includes two Rondos for piano and orchestra swapped out by Mozart, for various reasons, from two of his Piano Concertos. In a feat that I'm sure Mike Nichols would have applauded, Mozart has taken some fairly pedestrian, even banal, themes, and spun them into a high level of entertainment, if not actual profundity. Gulda, with able assistance from Leopold Hager and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, doesn't let down the side; he keeps the comedy moving, and he highlights the universal significance of the comic spirit. These two movements are a joy to listen to.

The second concert is actually a very special and famous one, and I'm quite surprised this portion of it has never been released before.  It's the first 40 minutes or so of The Meeting between Gulda and Chick Corea, from June 27, 1982. This is Gulda playing solo, mainly his own improvisations, with a fine, typically dynamic version of Mozart's K. 330 sonata providing a kind of centre of gravity to the proceedings. Gulda's pieces aren't jazz, precisely, though he's clearly at home in several jazz idioms. They're really more like post-modern pastiches, with lots of Mozart, bits of Bach and blues and full-blown Romantic passages, mixed with a very Viennese-sounding sense of satire and parody. They're an important part of Gulda's playfully profound music.

The duet portions of The Meeting are available both on CD, DVD and YouTube. Here is Gulda's solo portion:



And here's Mike Nichols and Elaine May in a classic skit:

Powerful choral and orchestral music by Arvo Pärt

 

Arvo Pärt's music always has about it a sense of bearing witness, and as such its power is best felt in the immediacy of a live performance, or the next best thing, a live recording. When the recording is as powerfully and beautifully played and sung and recorded as is this Arvo Pärt Live disc, we really cannot ask for more. The works chosen represent a cross-section of some of the greatest works by the Estonian composer, from his early Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten for string orchestra & bell, to the choral a cappella work Seven Magnificat Antiphons, to the complex work for chorus and orchestra Cecilia, vergine romana. The album begins with another early work, the Collage on BACH for strings, oboe, harpsichord and piano, which though it's in a completely different style than the rest of the works, stands as a sign-post to Pärt's future development. And it ends with the mysterious Litany – Prayers of St John Chrysostom for Each Hour of the Day and Night, which is beautifully sun by the Hilliard Ensemble. The 70 minutes of music takes one through passages of alternating terror, awe, sorrow and joy, which are liable to result in a profound aesthetic and/or religious experience.

The disc will be released on May 19, 2017.