Symphony No. 5 opus 47
Symphony No. 6 opus 54

Milan Giuseppe Verdi Symphony Orchestra
Oleg Caetani (conductor)

Arts Music CD 47668-2

Not top-notch Shostakovich, but here is a conductor of great promise

With the disappearance of the old Soviet Melodiya catalogue, seekers after authenticity in Shostakovich have had to look to recordings made outside Russia by musicians closely associated with the composer. Mstislav Rostropovich’s inspirational, overtly ‘politicised’ way with this music is perhaps best experienced live, though his recordings have their admirers: a third version of Symphony No 5 can be expected soon on the LSO Live label. Rudolf Barshai, another colleague and friend, is altogether cooler, compelling attention in a quite different way.

In this company, Oleg Caetani is less of an outsider than one might think. The son of Igor Markevitch (he took his mother’s family name), he studied with Kirill Kondrashin in Moscow and had the opportunity to peruse Mravinsky’s performance material in St Petersburg. His Milan orchestra may lack the nth degree of security and tonal richness, but its musicians have been making great strides under Riccardo Chailly’s direction, can deliver real pianissimi and would seem to possess an acoustically perfect hall. It is the immediate quality of the sound that makes this disc of particular interest: we are close to the players yet there is sufficient resonance to soften rough edges and flatter the lower strings.

Caetani’s view of these scores is unfussy and unforced, closer to the smoother sort of Western approach exemplified by André Previn and the LSO than Leonard Bernstein’s brand of hyper-intensity. The first movement of No 5 takes a while to get going. You’ll notice the unusually precise articulation of rhetorical gestures, often preceded by a vocal exhortation from the conductor, but you may be less happy with the rather pinched sonority of the brass. A few will consider the playing too ragged for repeated listening. The second movement trio can bear a blatantly intrusive nudge or two, inflections that may be part of the Mravinsky inheritance. The Largo is deeply felt, returning to the patient, slow-building strategy that characterises the music-making elsewhere; the finale is again ‘serious’, aptly cathartic but no workers’ playtime. The enthusiastic applause has not been edited out.

The Sixth, also live, has many of the same qualities. Though I personally prefer a more deliberate treatment of its opening paragraph, Caetani does bring out the first movement’s Mahlerian references in unusually direct fashion and there is more genuinely hushed intensity at its heart than you’ll find in many a big-name reading. The subsequent movements are well conceived and rhythmically well sprung, more transparent than usual if inevitably less brilliant than ideally they need to be. The finale in particular is pressed a bit too hard for an orchestra of this calibre. Even so, both readings confirm that Caetani’s ENO début, a successful revival of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina edited by Shostakovich, was no flash in the pan. The conductor, who takes over from Markus Stenz at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2005, is clearly a man to watch. The booklet-notes include some pertinent remarks from him but are otherwise unreliable when not wholly incomprehensible.

David Gutman
Gramophone, January 2004

Oleg Caetani, son of Igor Markevitch (‘Caetani’ is a matronymic), is a student of the great Kirill Kondrashin. He appears here with an orchestra that boasts Riccardo Chailly as principal conductor and Carlo Maria Giulini as Conductor Emeritus, and the disc is recorded in the new (1999) Auditorium di Milano. As a recording it is impressive (sample the cellos and basses and generally or, in particular, the opening of the second movement of the Fifth for a winning combination of definition and depth).

The Fifth, of course, enters a very, very crowded field indeed, and this is emphatically not a version to have one scurrying to re-evaluate the Shostakovich shelf, despite moments of strength. For a live performance, performance standards may be generally high, but where is the extra intensity a live event is supposed to bring with it?. The very close of second movement of the Fifth, which should be so dismissive, is here a damp squib; the slow movement lacks emotional focus (this is Bernstein territory, really); the finale is under-powered, especially from the brass. Timpani are muted (they need to be more incisive – harder sticks would have been a good idea) and the trumpet solo at 2’30 is very recessed (all we can really hear are swirling strings – the trumpet may as well be off-stage).

There is some expressive playing here (the flute and harp duet in the slow movement is magical, for example), but the end result is interpretatively diffuse.

The Sixth Symphony is a masterpiece that has been overshadowed by the more immediate appeal of the Fifth. A great shame – it needs more exposure in our concert halls. It receives a better performance overall than the Fifth. The first movement (Largo) does possess a rather intriguing inevitability despite its harmonic/gestural ambiguities (or, as the booklet notes would have it, ‘instable harmony’!). But Caetani can smooth out textures that Shostakovich obviously needs to sound as bare as possible, weakening the effect of some passages. Problems of live performance inform the middle Allegro, although many will warm to the crunching climax (4’22). A more manic approach, too, would have paid dividends in the comic-strip antics of the Presto finale, where again the perils of public performance are highlighted.

Worthwhile remembering, too, that Mravinsky (who premiered the work in November 1939) and the Leningraders are available at medium price on Le Chant du Monde, recorded in 1955 in Prague, profitably coupled with the Twelfth Symphony. To listen to Mravinsky in the first movement of the Sixth is to enter into another world from Caetani’s entirely. Viscerally intense, memorably disturbing to the core, Mravinsky lays the score open for the listener like an raw wound and leaves one in no doubt whatsoever that this is great music. His orchestra, of course, is the real thing – there is an intrinsic rightness about the woodwind tone and phrasing, and the strings play preternaturally together, negotiating Shostakovich’s tricky corners with seeming ease. Polyansky on Chandos boasts an interesting filler (The Execution of Stepan Razin, Op. 119) but, like Caetani, signally fails to rise to Mravinsky’s heights.

Despite some impressive moments, then, Caetani remains ultimately unrecommendable. In addition, confusion currently reigns as to the price of this disc. International Record Review claims full price; Gramophone budget; Amazon budget/lower medium; HMV medium. So, should you want it, shop around – I have previously seen Arts discs for super-budget before now!.

Colin Clarke
MusicWeb, January 2004