Symphony No. 1 opus 10
Symphony no. 2 B major "To October" with chorus opus 14
Symphony no. 3 E flat major "The first of May" with chorus opus 20
Symphony no. 4 C minor opus 43
Symphony no. 5 D minor opus 47
Symphony no. 6 B minor opus 54
Symphony no. 7 C major "Leningrad" opus 60
Symphony no. 8 C minor opus 65
Symphony no. 9 E flat major opus 70
Symphony no. 10 E minor opus 93
Symphony no. 11 G minor "The year 1905" opus 103
Symphony no. 12 D minor "The year 1917" opus 112
Symphony no. 13 B flat minor "Babi-Yar" after poems by Y. Yevtushenko for bass, bass chorus and orchestra opus 113
Symphony no. 14 for soprano, bass, string orchestra and percussion opus 135
Symphony no. 15 A major opus 141

WDR Symphony Orchestra
Rudolf Barshai (conductor)
WDR Radio Chorus (in Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3)
Choral Academy Moscow, Sergei Aleksashkin (bass) (in Symphony No. 13)
Alla Simoni (soprano) & Vladimir Vaneev (bass) (in Symphony No. 14)

Brilliant Classics 6275

The primary question any collector will want answered is, "Is this set worth buying?" The answer is a clear and unambiguous, "Yes." Rudolf Barshai is mostly wonderfully served by his orchestra and he rarely puts a foot wrong in the works of his teacher and compatriot. His engineers have done a generally fine job. The notes, by the unaffiliated Dr David Doughty, are useful and each disc has a separate archive photograph on the cover and the insert. As I received the set each disc is packaged in a separate jewel-case with its own notes and the whole comes in a large slip case which will look very well on the shelves. I believe other packagings are available. Whatever, at its price it is a remarkable bargain.

But it would be a neglect of duty to stop there because this important issue is not uniformly good, indeed it varies from outstanding to slightly disappointing. So, on to the details.

The notes with the first three symphonies also include a profile of Rudolf Barshai, which, I was disappointed to see, includes no mention of his work with our own Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. The 1st Symphony is treated to an excellent recording with the lovely acoustic of the Cologne Philharmonie much in evidence. The orchestra is well spread across the sound-stage. The bass is really deep and the treble clean and natural. The splendid woodwind playing of the WDR Orchestra is very well balanced, as is the entire ensemble. The whole symphony goes exactly as one expects it to with no oddities, no interpretative intrusions, no "clever" ideas; just a straight and very good performance. I felt as though I was listening to Shostakovich and not to Barshai’s "version" of him. This launched my many hours with this set in fine style and was a very encouraging start. It also turned out to be the one defining characteristic of the entire enterprise - the absolute absence of quirks from the conductor. This is pure Shostakovich; no one else intrudes. Whatever else one may have to say, that is a paramount recommendation.

The long and atmospheric slow opening of the 2nd Symphony is well drawn and the busy scherzo that follows is performed with suitable punch. The Radio Chorus acquit themselves with honour too in their panegyric to "October, Communism and Lenin." It is hard to like this odd piece but I was as convinced by Barshai’s rendering as I have ever been by anyone’s.

The 3rd Symphony, designed along the same lines as the Second, is perhaps still less effective despite all the hectic activity and choral and orchestral noise. I suppose that next to the comic racket of Mossolov’s "The Iron Foundry" it sounds quite restrained, but these two pieces are unlikely ever to join the standard repertoire.

The massive 4th Symphony opens a little disappointingly in that the percussion is just not prominent enough. To get a real thwack in the solar plexus one has to turn to Haitink and the Concertgebouw on Decca, or even more to a Eurodisc CD of a 1988 performance by the USSR State Orchestra conducted by Rozhdestvensky. Barshai’s recording is slightly disturbed by much loud page-turning at various points, one of several indications that these performances were not studio based but derived from broadcast recordings, possibly in front of a very quiet audience. The opening movement of number 4 is a bit slow and there were moments where the strings sounded a little stressed, as well they might in this work of all the symphonies. At moments like this I missed the security of the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Haitink. If one’s neighbours are not a problem then this CD gains from an increase in volume since the finale’s earthquake climaxes do need space to expand.

The 5th is given a very powerful opening by the strings with a brilliantly penetrating piccolo and a nicely audible piano. I also noted the horns were suitably ominous. A slight miscalculation of balance leads the solo violin to sound from the back of the firsts rather than the front but this is minor. Apart from the excellent ensemble displayed in this work I was mainly pleased by Barshai’s observing of an appropriately slow tempo for the "exultant" coda which Shostakovich once described thus: "It is as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’" (Testimony) This is a good 5th but I still would not be without Maxim Shostakovich (Collins nla) or Sanderling (Berlin Classics).

In opening of the 6th there is again an unerring choice of the right tempo, which, with the very impressive horns, imparts a real heroic quality. The balance between string, wind and brass choirs is very well judged and the impression is given of separate threads developing in parallel; a real "large scale integration of contrasts" as such a symphony should be. The WDR Orchestra give such a good impression of being a Russian orchestra with pungent wind playing and powerful brass. What marks them out from most Soviet performances is that they are so well recorded. The string playing in this 6th is really magnificent. This is as good a performance of the Largo as I have ever heard. The wildness of the 2nd and 3rd movements come as even more of a shock after such intensity. The Allegro opens with utmost delicacy, everything very precisely pointed. Brilliantly done, if not as exciting as some I have heard. The finale is again not as fast as some but done with such fierce precision as to make it sound even angrier. There could, I accept, be more abandon, but this is outstandingly good..

There are some stage noises in the Leningrad that remind one of the recording source. If there is an audience present they are pretty quiet. The 7th starts off at a very determined tempo and once again the WDR wind sound remarkably Russian. The idyllic passage pre- the Nazi march is strikingly realised with every part balanced to perfection. This restraint and purity makes the onset of the march even more striking. The attack of the percussionists is really savage, a very brutal exposition indeed and the end of the 1st movement, when it comes, is a suitably bleak reaction. After a well drawn memories movement the adagio gets all the long, strong string lines it needs from this fine orchestra. Cologne Radio are a truly excellent band. The finale is good but I am no more convinced by this performance than any other. It is worth reiterating that there is a lot of extraneous noise in the Leningrad, more so than elsewhere. One can distinctly hear music desks creaking, pages turning, even brass players blowing clear their instruments. It is the earliest of these recordings and perhaps the engineers had adopted different microphone placements to those used later.

No. 8's adagio is very slow and deliberate but, as always, played with great strength. Whether one should see this as Barshai being inflexible and relentless as befits the music, or as unwilling to go with the drama of this great movement, is a matter of personal opinion. Heard live I am sure this was impressive. The whole work is of a piece because the 2nd and 3rd movements are also very deliberate but played with great power. As mentioned earlier the performance just sounds "right" but it is worth mentioning that Mravinsky, the dedicatee, takes five minutes less than Barshai. Even so the latter is not as long-winded as Braithwaite in the recent Eloquence issue reviewed elsewhere on these pages.

Having, after 7 and 8, been lulled into a sense that Barshai was going grey and relentless on me, I approached the 9th with some reservations. Would his unbending approach bring this lightest of Shostakovich’s symphonies to its knees. Certainly not. The first movement is brilliantly characterful with solo playing that really lets rip. "Smashing" I put in my notes! The 2nd movement strikes exactly the right nonchalant note. The 3rd launches back into "fun" mode. The short largo 4th movement, a Shostakovich joke if ever I heard one, leads into a steady allegretto finale, at least until the final outburst. Barshai passes the test with flying colours. Excellent!

The 10th symphony is characterised by a lot of high wind writing and this is dramatically and relentlessly presented here. Onto the famous 2nd movement. Even at a steady tempo, nothing like as fast as Ancerl on the newly released DG ‘Originals’ CD, the quality of string chording keeps the "portrait of Stalin" exciting and menacing. I noted earlier the quality of the bass sound and the slow movement, at the moment when the DSCH motif is blasted out in triumph, is particularly impressive because the bass goes down so far. It was the lack of that depth that made the 4th less gripping but it is present in spades here. The woodwind play magnificently throughout No.10 and by the time the finale has hammered its way to its close I was convinced that the performance was again absolutely right.

I must lay my cards on the table with No.11. I love it! The more I hear the piece the better it becomes. Barshai is faster than my favourite Berglund (EMI) but from the very rounded muted trumpet sounds near the start to the huge clangs on the bells at the end this performance it did greatly impress. Perhaps there are moments where the engineers have taken fright and pulled the volume back but generally this works well. Barshai chooses exactly the right measured pace for the moments in the Adagio Eternal memory where some conductors feel they have to accelerate. Barshai’s unwillingness to deviate makes for massive impact. Again the wind section shine, especially the cor anglais in the finale. Barshai has almost exactly the same timing as Mravinsky and Cluytens in this movement. Since the latter recorded in the presence of the composer one assumes it to be correct. Superb!

The opening of No. 12 is steady but this has the advantage of allowing room for the tempo to increase as the movement proceeds. To be honest the symphony needs sensitive handling because it really is the weakest of Shostakovich’s works apart from numbers 2 and 3. Here it might be that Barshai’s "right" approach is just not enough. Listen to Mravinsky for a demonstration of how the work can go. However, Barshai builds plenty of tension. The hushed pizzicato opening of the Aurora movement is very impressive. This movement is the core "revolutionary movement" and the name refers to the battleship ‘Aurora’ which shelled the Winter Palace in 1917. It is really atmospheric with very deep rich sound which makes the salvoes of the Aurora’s guns very cinematic. Barshai’s strait-laced approach to the finale either gives the piece much needed gravitas or defuses the excitement. The listener must choose. But listening to Mravinsky through a hail of coughing on a 1984 Leningrad performance shows what a devastating epic the 12th can be in the right hands.

No. 13 is a choral and vocal symphony and I am sorry to say that Brilliant have included no words. This is a great pity because they really are necessary for the full impact of this masterpiece to be felt. David Doughty was probably unaware that there would be no words included because he doesn’t say much to help in the notes. However good this performance is, this is a black mark. On the up side we have a Russian solo bass and a Russian chorus. The soloist Sergei Aleksashkin sings with real passion and the chorus sounds equally involved. Even Barshai seems more inside this piece than the 12th. The big climax after the reference to Ann Frank in the first movement is absolutely devastating, as it should be. The entire Babi Yar movement is very moving indeed. The 2nd movement is done with just the right skittish, or even vicious, wit. It is very rhythmic and includes some terrific wind playing. Magnificently done but of course without the words ... In the Store is a hugely moving tribute to Russian womenfolk and their long-suffering patience in the face of war and oppression. The soloist is again very moving and the choral outburst on the lines "it is sinful to short-change them" is overwhelming. The massive Wagnerian growling from the brass at the start of Fears screws up the tension still more. Shostakovich seems to be wiping himself clean of some awful scourge in this movement. The chorus and soloist are outstanding. By the end I was exhausted and very moved. This is a great performance.

No. 14 was premiered by Barshai - which makes the insult of no words still worse! The first thing to note is how short the performance is compared to my current favourite, the BBC NOW recording on BIS. Barshai takes an amazing 10 minutes less than Wigglesworth. I have to say that neither soloist is as good as on BIS either. Who can easily compare to BIS’s John Tomlinson anyway? The soprano sounds a bit effortful at times and the microphones pick up a nasty edge to her voice. It is not a comfortable listening experience. The strings and percussion however sound very fine. The fifth movement, On the watch brings some excellent singing from Alla Simoni, as does the 6th movement Madam Look where her abrupt way with "and I laugh, laugh, laugh" is very Russian! I get so caught up in this magnificent symphony that I forget to be critical. The performance may not be the best but it is as good as is needed for this masterly music to make its impact. Again I suppose, just right!

Finally to number 15. The WDR orchestra still sounds good. They are a very fine orchestra indeed, especially in this repertoire (one must not forget all the great things they did with Günter Wand over the same period). They clarify the many busy textures in this cryptic symphonic swansong. The cellist in the 1st movement solo is excellent too, as is the trombonist. I did begin to wonder if it wasn’t all a bit rushed though. The audience does not help either; coughing audibly on at least two occasions. For almost the only time in this huge cycle the orchestra goes almost off the rails in the allegretto - and again in the finale - a reflection I suppose of this being a set of broadcast performances rather than studio-edited perfection. Barshai takes over 5 minute less in this 15th symphony than do the likes of Haitink and Rozhdestvensky and overall I found him disappointingly perfunctory. With the orchestra also off form this last piece is not quite good enough.

In summary this set includes at least four excellent performances, 1, 5, 9 and 11, and two great performances, Nos.6 and 13. Only No.15 is substandard, the rest are very good. Yes, you could accumulate a better set if you shopped around and spent a lot more money, but you would be unlikely to hear the works better played or better recorded except occasionally. As a way to experience one of the greatest symphonic cycles of the 20th century this has to be an essential purchase at this price.

Dave Billinge
MusicWeb, June 2002

As you can see, this cycle was built up over a period of eight years. A review elsewhere of no. 7 (the discs are also coming out separately on the Regis label) states that they are live recordings. The documentation here says nothing to that effect and they certainly sound like studio recordings, clear but with the reverberation typical of a large empty hall. The same sound engineer, Siegfried Spittler, is named all through, and for most of the time the producer is Christoph Held, joined by Reiner (or Heiner, the covers can’t make up their minds) Müller-Adolphi in nos. 7 and 8 and replaced by Hans-Martin Höpner in the last recordings (13 and 14). The results are consistently impressive, big and shattering in the climaxes without losing focus in the quieter sections.

This set marks a departure from the usual Brilliant Classics trend. Rather than 11 jewel-cases flimsily held together by a strip of cardboard we get a sturdy box, containing the 11 CDs each in a smart envelope of its own [Editor’s Note: increasingly Brilliant are offering purchasers both options] and, glory of glory, a booklet, in English, which gives a profile of the conductor and a well-argued essay on each symphony by David Doughty. We don’t get the texts for nos. 13 and 14 but at least we have a summary of each poem. In the case of no. 2 and 3 it’s probably better not to know what they are singing about. Even the layout has the indefinable air of a quality product, with its uncompromising insistence on chronological order even when this results in some short playing times (nos. 12 and 15 could have gone together, for example, but why worry at this price?).

Doughty is commendably honest in his presentation; he does not attempt to deny that, alongside a few towering masterpieces, this cycle contains a lot of messy and sheerly uninspired music. He also states the pre- and post-"Testimony" views on some of the works without necessarily coming down on one side or another. This is all the more welcome as the accompaniment to a cycle by a conductor who, we are told (and the results bear this out), brings out "the meaning of a composition purely on the basis of the score. Barshai needs no additional ingredients to make a piece ‘interesting’; he shows what the music itself has to say". In the case of no. 5 - our perceptions of which have changed totally since "Testimony", affecting in particular the manner in which the finale is to be played - Barshai unleashes from the score the most numbing evidence possible in favour of the "Testimony" interpretation. By the end of the finale all remaining attempts at humanity or beauty have been mercilessly smashed aside – the perfect musical counterpart of the odious O’Brien’s words in Orwell’s 1984: "if you want an image of the future, think of a boot stamping on a child’s face". And, while I don’t doubt that Barshai found his evidence in the score, he was also in the know. He worked professionally and as a friend with Shostakovich from the 1940s till the composer’s death and stated in a 1983 BBC radio interview that "Testimony" was "all true". I have started here because, if in the last resort I find these sturdy, powerful readings don’t quite engage me as the best of Mravinsky or Kondrashin can, I would like to emphasise that there is at least one absolutely enthralling performance in the set.

When the first wave of Soviet musicians were allowed to tour the Western world in the 1960s, audiences found in Rudolf Barshai, then known principally as a great viola-player and as the founder-conductor of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, a musician not quite corresponding to the penny-in-the-slot image of a Russian dynamo, all brilliance, savagery and seething tension. (But audiences acquainted with the art of Nikolai Malko should have known better than to typecast Russian musicians). Barshai proved that a Russian could be perfectly idiomatic in Mozart and Beethoven. After his move to the west in 1976 Barshai has won a lot of respect without ever quite making it to the top. The booklet profile, taking up a comment by Shostakovich about Barshai’s "Eroica", states that his "music-making could most easily be compared to Klemperer’s".

Easily said, when Klemperer recordings of Shostakovich are not exactly two-a-penny. But wait, there is one, so let’s examine the two conductors in Shostakovich’s 9th Symphony. Klemperer’s 1955 Turin performance of this work used to be available on a Cetra LP and is occasionally re-broadcast by the RAI; we may hope that one day a re-mastering of the original tapes will produce a less scrawny sound than that of the off-the-air tape I am working from. At the outset Klemperer is so much slower than Barshai that it seems ridiculous, but then you realise that he is thoroughly enjoying the droll humour of it all, and he gets bouncier rhythms and cheekier phrasing. It sounds closer to Kurt Weill’s pre-war Berlin than to post-war Shostakovich, but it has character and I’m afraid Barshai’s neat reading sounds merely bland in comparison. Klemperer also gets a weird mixture of beauty and sleaze out of the second movement and in the third movement, where he is scarcely slower than Barshai, the players sound possessed where Barshai’s are no more than spick and span. By this time Klemperer has the Turiners absolutely under his thumb. The brass in the fourth movement blow raspberries in a way Barshai does not even attempt and the Turin bassoonist is momentarily transformed into the greatest bassoonist in the world as Klemperer coaxes a saxophone-like whine and some bilious rubato from him. And in the finale Klemperer, at a faster tempo than Barshai, again revels in the cheekiness of the music.

So please, a warning to over-zealous fans of present day musicians: don’t make comparisons that risk blowing up in your face! Barshai is a very fine conductor but a great conductor is another thing and Klemperer, even in music for which he presumably had only a passing interest, was unmistakably that.

But back to Barshai and in many ways I feel he is to be appreciated in Shostakovich for the same reasons as Berglund is to be appreciated in Sibelius. He has a way of letting the sound well out of the orchestra rather than forcing it out and his tempi seem to set up a momentum of their own. You do not feel the conductor whipping up the allegros, Solti-fashion, indeed, in a way you hardly feel an interpreter at all, a tribute to the scrupulous preparation, both as regards articulation and colour, which enables the actual performances to blossom with complete naturalness. If this sounds unexciting, then listen to the first movement of no. 4 which builds up to a colossal climax. If in many ways he seems an unusually westernised Russian, he has his winds screaming and his brass braying in the best of Mravinskian traditions. Indeed, it is often the faster, noisier movements which benefit from Barshai’s approach. Just by taking it at face value, he makes no. 2 stand up better than it often does and in no. 12 he makes you think, up to at least the half-way mark, that this work’s insistence on just two themes repeated in every movement might actually be a matter of thematic discipline rather than utter poverty of invention. On the other hand, a more interventionist approach (such as Bernstein’s) is needed if the arid wastes of no. 7 are to yield a minimum of music. A tendency for slow movements to lack tension perhaps explains why nos. 8 and 10, though strongly played, are not completely overwhelming, and in no. 11 Barshai seems engaged only by the third movement (by far the best). He is fully effective in the last three, Shostakovich’s return to symphonic health. Barshai was the original interpreter of no. 14 and recorded it almost immediately. He is still master of its enigmatic textures and here and in no. 13 he has the benefit of secure and expressive soloists.

A sturdy, truthful set, then, which in some ways combines the Russian and Western approaches to this composer. And which has a great no. 5.

Christopher Howell
MusicWeb, July 2002

You pays your money and you takes your choice - this set comes packaged in either standard individual jewel-cases or cardboard sleeves. My copy is the latter. I rather like it. It’s such a neat little box. At just under an inch and a quarter thick (a nadge over three centimetres to the Euro-orientated), it belies the sheer magnitude of its contents. Just to listen through it a couple of times equates to a full three days’ work. Alright, it may be far more fun than working, but it’s still a daunting prospect. It’s only now, faced with it myself, that I start to properly appreciate the sheer effort involved in reviewing complete cycles. Suddenly humbled, I take off my hat (well, cloth cap) to those reviewers who scale heights like the Haydn Symphonies, the Mozart Edition or that Everest of oeuvres, the complete works of J. S. Bach - and somehow survive to tell the tale.

Shostakovich’s symphonies, even in their entirety, are hardly in the same league when it comes to plain, old-fashioned bulk. However, in the "salutary experience" stakes, even one Shostakovich symphony can take some swallowing, to the extent that sitting down and scoffing the lot in a single, mightily protracted gulp brings on not indigestion but another hot flush of humility. Let’s face it, even Mahler felt that three hammer blows were enough to finish him off, so what chance does a mere mortal have when repeatedly thumped in the ribs through fifteen gruelling rounds?

Sure, I’ve watched the documentaries, and I’ve read the books (some of them). But working my way through all the symphonies, one after the other, convinced me with an ear-searing immediacy that no one symphony on its own can punch home how appallingly fearful Shostakovich’s life was. That he managed to produce anything at all under such conditions is remarkable, that he produced so much is amazing, and that he somehow maintained his individuality - along with the wit to express it - under a regime that habitually murdered individualists simply beggars belief. You’d really have to have a heart of stone to listen to these symphonies from first to last and emerge at the far end entirely unscathed.

This starts to look like it has the makings of a harrowing write-up. Yet again I am humbled. How would I - or you, for that matter - have got on, had I (or you) been in his place? "First train to the salt mines" springs to mind. Yet Shostakovich not only maintained his marbles intact, but also (and don’t ask me how!) managed to hang on to his sense of humour. Whether wry, ironic, mordant, or uninhibitedly uproarious, the jester in him is irrepressible: no matter how dire things became, Shostakovich never seemed to let them get him down for long. Surely, he must be one of the few truly heroic figures in history, and prime material for a high-class, big-budget "bio-pic". I sometimes try to imagine what it would have been like, if Eamonn Andrews had ever intoned the words "Dmitri Shostakovich, this is yurr loif!" (especially compared to some of the barely-out-of-nappies dross that Michael Aspel has to contend with these days).

Mind you, we might reasonably be tempted to ask, "Which life?" There are at least two versions of the tale (plus more variants than I’ve had hot dinners). In its simplest terms, this depends largely on whether or not you believe Solomon Volkov’s Testimony. If you don’t, you have to try to extricate the "truth" from the "official" Soviet history, which is not easy (given that there are lies, damned lies, statistics, and "official" Soviet history!). Even now, with both Berlin Wall and USSR dead and buried, and much more open access to information, we would still seem to be a long way from the real truth of the matter. The one thing that’s emerging unequivocally (for now, anyway!) is that Volkov’s view is "correct", if not altogether then at least in principle - and that’s shocking enough in itself. In what follows, I’m sure it goes without saying that I am necessarily expressing what I personally have come to believe regarding Shostakovich’s life and motivations. As things stand, the "truth" is something that we each must decide for ourselves.

Anyway, as I was saying, it’s such a neat little box, a decently robust container for the 11 CDs. Unfortunately, the individual cardboard sleeves are a little too robust, or rather they are a tad too snug-fitting - getting a disc out can be a right tussle. Companies especially please note! The sleeve should be a loose enough fit so that, by holding it between the fingers and thumb of one hand and gently squidging it, the disc will slip out edgewise onto the other hand, neatly caught through the spindle-hole by a middle finger. I soon learnt to immediately apply the less than ideal remedy of easing each sleeve to give its resident CD a bit more elbow room. This is a serious complaint, as I found that the rim of CD3 was marked all around its circumference, rendering the end of the Sixth Symphony’s middle movement unplayable. I managed to salvage it, but the procedure - involving diligent polishing with a very soft cloth and a minute drop of something like "Silvo" - is hair-raisingly risky even if you’re confident that you know what you’re doing. Of course, as a consumer you would just demand a replacement, but then that may be the same! You would in any case be well advised to store the CDs in their slip-cases "upside down", with the label side facing the overlapping join in the cardboard. The real point, though, is that this simply should not be a problem in the first place.

On a brighter note, I give full marks for the very striking art-work! As is usual, both box and booklet bear the same illustration but each sleeve, following the same style, bears a different illustration. The CDs themselves all copy the CD1 sleeve illustration. The 28-page booklet contains 28 pages of English, believe it or not! I wonder if copies distributed in (say) Germany are similarly graced with all-German booklets? I sincerely hope so. Four pages are, quite rightly, devoted to a profile of Rudolf Barshai, and either one or two pages to each symphony. The former is by Bernd Feuchtner, the latter by David Doughty who deftly runs a narrative thread of historical context through his informative discussions of the symphonies. Now, it’s all starting to look dangerously like a stonking good buy for "newcomers", so I should advise such folk that prior knowledge is assumed. This is fair enough: there are lots of leads for the interested to follow up and, well, we don’t want everything dished up on a plate, pre-chewed or (heaven forbid!) pre-digested, do we?

Even the mildly-initiated will be attracted by the name of Rudolf Barshai. He’s been around a bit, and in lots of the right places. A one-time composition student and performing colleague of Shostakovich, he’s perhaps generally best known for his string orchestral arrangement of the latter’s Eighth String Quartet, but between the sheets of this web site he also gained some reflected notoriety as conductor of that recording of Mahler’s Fifth, our review of which caused such a kerfuffle a while back [see http://www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2001/Apr01/Mahler5.htm for the review and a supporting article by Norman LeBrecht]. His performing credentials are substantial right where it counts: creator of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, conductor of the first performance of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony in 1969 and, as a viola-player of considerable standing, founder member of both the Borodin and Tchaikovsky string quartets. This chap would seem to be well acquainted with all the necessary personal onions.

With everything else about the booklet being ship-shape and Bristol-fashion, it’s a shame that a few words about the orchestra couldn’t have been included, seeing as the WDRSO is hardly a household name. In a sudden fit of altruism, I chased up the WDRSO website to get some information for you. It’s in German, so I had to resort to Google’s "translate-a-page" service, whence it becomes my solemn and bounden duty to pass on to you these priceless gems, verbatim seeing as I don’t think that I dare risk rendering them into colloquial English. This orchestra "developed 1947 in the northwestGerman broadcast at that time (NWDR) and belongs today to the West German broadcast", and "it is not only the ‘house orchestra’ of the WDR for radio and television productions, but presents itself also with numerous concerts in the Cologne Philharmonic Concert Hall and in the whole transmission area". In addition, "its outstanding call it acquired itself in co-operation with the principal conductors Christoph of Dohnányi, Zdenek Macal, Hiroshi Wakasugi, Gary Bertini and Hans Vonk". I hope you’re following this, because there’s a bit more yet: "as considerable guest conductors stood as Claudio Abbado, Karl Boehm, Fritz shrubs, Herbert of Karajan, Erich nuthatch, petrol Klemperer, Lorin Maazel, Sir André Previn, Zubin Mehta, Sir George Solti and Guenter wall at the desk of the orchestra". In terms of repertoire, I should mention that "apart from the care of the classical-romantic repertoire the WDR Sinfonieorchester Cologne made itself 20 particularly by its interpretations of the music. Century a name. Luciano Berio, Hans's Werner Henze, Mauricio Kagel, Krzysztof Penderecki, Igor Strawinskij, Karl Heinz stick living and Bernd Alois Carpenter belong to the contemporary composers, who specified their works - to a large extent order compositions of the WDR - with the WDR Sinfonieorchester Cologne".

Apart from now being all too well aware of the German for "shrubs", "nuthatch", "petrol" (?), "stick", "living" and "carpenter", I gather (or I think I do) that the WDRSO is a top-notch provincial orchestra on a par with (say) the UK’s BBC Philharmonic. My mouth waters at the prospect: I don’t know about you, but I generally find such orchestras far more exciting than any of the pan-global mega-orchestras. For a start, they often retain some local "flavour", and being somehow less exalted and hence nearer the gut-level ground, they seem to be more attuned to what it means to make real music for real people, don’t you think? Well, in this instance, that’s exactly what we’re about to find out, so here goes ...

Symphony No. 1 op. 10 (1926)

Having hit the mat in Maternity only in 1906, Shostakovich was still in short pants when Lenin and Co. hit the streets in 1917, and not overlong out of short pants in 1926 when he presented his graduation thesis for the scrutiny of his professors at the Petrograd (or Leningrad, or St. Petersburg) Conservatory. It’s hardly overwhelming news that in this "thesis", his First Symphony, the young Shostakovich exposes his influences as blatantly as any young lad might his underpants through torn breeches. They are all there: Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Mahler, and Glazunov, his teacher at the Conservatory. What is perhaps surprising is that there is relatively little of Rimsky-Korsakov, who taught both Glazunov and Prokofiev, and was Stravinsky’s mentor. That’s because, by the time he wrote this landmark op. 10, the precocious youngster had already worked his way over that particular hurdle (try Shostakovich’s Scherzo, op. 1, or Theme with Variations op. 3 to be found on a Melodiya-sourced BMG twofer, cat. no. 74321 59058 2 - shades a-plenty of Rimsky-Korsakov there!).

What really brings you up short about this music is not so much the oft-voiced "astonishing accomplishment for one so young" - as a symphony, it’s as short on structural integrity as it is long on youthful bombast (and that’s not a grumble!) - but that, like Mahler’s equally youthful Das Klagende Lied, it already contains all the key elements of his maturity bar only one, and that is the ability to "carry the line". Not that we should worry - here’s a burgeoning genius, revelling in a Brave New World of Cultural Revolution, singing his socks off at the top of his voice (it would be quite a few years yet, before he had to sing his socks off to save his life). That it’s "not bad for starters" has been borne out by the music’s enduring, and richly deserved, popularity.

On went CD1. The Moment of Truth. After all the expectation-building, would my face fall? No, it didn’t; instead it was my jaw that dropped. A clear, bright trumpet, a cuddly bassoon, a clarinet tone to die for! Oh, and beautifully judged chamber-music textures, clearly etched against a warm acoustic - and I could hear all the percussion, from the black bumping of the bass drum right up to the tingle of the triangle. Doughty points out a Petrushka-like "grotesquerie", but Barshai finds more than that. Within the confines of a sprightly basic allegretto, he uncovers a delightful whimsicality interweaving the brash buffoonery, a perception he carries though to the allegro of the second movement, where Shostakovich substitutes athleticism for buffoonery. By the time I got to halfway through the lento third movement, Barshai had me dubbing this symphony "Ode to Youth". He laces the throbbing adolescent passion with spoonfuls of syrup that bring out the tang of bitter lemon in Shostakovich’s gauche trumpet-and-snare-drum fanfare figures. The eruption of the finale’s opening, basses shovelling the tam-tam up and over, is superbly done. Shostakovich adds to his brew the impetuosity of a young man, all fired up but as yet with nothing on which to vent his brimming bellyful of crackling energy, exposed nerves twitching and pulsing because they haven’t quite learnt how to insulate themselves from the raw stimuli of Life. There may be Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Mahler looking over his shoulder. Ignore them - this is Shostakovich, rearing up, kicking at the traces, and raring to go!

If, in bringing out the youthful buffoonery, zest, and unbridled passions, Barshai misses a single trick, then I didn’t spot it. His only misjudgement would seem to be the rapid-fire repeated notes at about 2'17 into the finale, which are that damned quick that they are smeared into tremolandi, though whether through imprecise articulation or "saturation" of the warm acoustic it’s hard to say. Yes, every now and then there are little lapses or awkward corners in the WDRSO’s playing, but these are nothing to write home about, particularly when compared to the spirit of their music-making, which positively bristles with vitality and (dare I say it?) commitment. Stunning.

Symphony No. 2 op. 14 "To October" (1927)

A year down the line, Shostakovich was channelling his creative energies like nobody’s business. In the euphoric years of cultural revolution the artistic community was humming, like a beehive in July, with invention and experiment. In those heady days, it was even OK to exchange ideas with the "West". Shostakovich was as happy as a pig in muck. In line with the original communist ethos, there was a great demand for enthusiastic blowing of own trumpets. The Soviet Union was an unprecedented hotbed of "team-building", which reached fever-pitch with the imminence of the 10th. anniversary of the Revolution. Shostakovich’s Second Symphony was, quite simply, written in response to a State commission for a work to glorify the achievements of the Red Revolution. And why not? Everything in the garden was rosy!

I wonder why, when the Brits belt out stuff like Rule, Britannia! or the Yanks, hands on hearts, intone God Bless America, we call it "patriotism", yet the minute the Reds of Russia try the self-same thing we call it "political propaganda" (or, worse, "agitprop")? Smacks of double standards to me. Along with the Third - and, for that matter, the Seventh, Eleventh and Twelfth - Shostakovich’s Second has come in for a fair old bit of stick for its "propagandism", the problem being that along with the propagandist bathwater, the musical baby has tended to be chucked out. To be perfectly honest (which I usually am), I think that the Second Symphony is actually a very good piece of music, lacking only a decent belter of a singable tune for its choral finale.

Moreover, in sonic terms the largo introduction is one of Shostakovich’s most adventurous passages. Light years off the beaten track of his otherwise direct style this is an incredible impressionistic wash of shifting layers of sound. At first, I thought of the opening of Rheingold, but then - well, although I can’t imagine that Shostakovich would have even heard of Charles Ives, let alone his music, this sounds for all the world as if it ought to be called "The Dnieper at Kiev, from Three Places in Little Russia"! From the black (Dylan Thomas would surely have called it "bible black") bass drum roll at the start, Barshai builds a real feeling of oily oppression and creepy-crawly foment, aided by some deeply rosiny basses.

When the main allegro molto started, I was again impressed by the sound of the WDRSO, this time particularly by the nut-flavoured woodwind and some spectacularly raucous brass. Already, Shostakovich is learning to "carry his line", courtesy of a quasi-fugal treatment of his materials. Barshai grabs the opportunity with both hands, moulding out of the embattled confusion a terrific build-up to a broader climax. With the melodic and harmonic contours veering momentarily towards Scriabin, this sounds not so much like "We are victorious!" as "Are we victorious?" Barshai equally coaxes some real Russian gloom out of the ominous disquiet of the slower central music. The final, choral section is fired off by a factory siren, apparently "keyed in F sharp", though how I don’t know! This cuts in so alarmingly that it’ll have the family dog running for cover. The WDR chorus sound full-bodied and pretty idiomatic, standing their end resolutely against the big orchestra. Only their final words, which are supposed to be "shouted", sound a bit understated, and frankly I’m a bit surprised that Barshai didn’t put a rocket under them! Chorus versus Orchestra is never an easy balance to strike, but it’s struck superbly here. There’re neither words nor translation given of the poem (by Alexander Bezymensky), though we are told the gist of it: "Lenin - struggle - October - the Commune - Lenin", which is probably all we need to know?

All in all, with some terrifically intense playing, Barshai and the WDRSO (and Chorus) make out a convincing case for this symphony, which although it isn’t Shostakovich’s best is still nowhere near the unmitigated "crock of s***e" that some folk would have us believe.

Symphony No. 3 op. 20 "First of May" (1929)

Having its origins in pre-Christian fertility rites, the traditional May Day festival celebrates the coming of spring-time with garlanded processions and maypole dancing. Or at least it does where it survives - I often wonder why in this day and age we forego the simple rustic pleasures of innocent little fertility rites. It’s likely that the festival’s association with "rebirth" or "renewal" influenced the 1889 International Socialist Congress in its designation of May Day as an international labour day, which in its turn was adopted by the Soviets to celebrate their victory over the Tsarist regime. Looked at this way, the seemingly obscure connection between floral frolics on the village green and parades of military might in Red Square becomes crystal clear, doesn’t it?

Shostakovich cheerfully opted for the same "one continuous movement with choral ending" format as he had for the Second, but adopting otherwise (as you might expect) a lighter, more festive overall tone. Doughty points out that "again there is little attempt at true symphonic form", whatever "true" might mean in relation to such an all-embracing, infinitely flexible musical model as the Symphony. My feeling is that Shostakovich deliberately sacrificed the relatively conventional form and much of the melodic invention of his First Symphony at the altar of colourful and rhythmic effect, so that he could concentrate on honing his argumentative techniques - and that’s why the Second and Third symphonies are generally regarded as the crucibles in which he forged his mature style. Once he’d cracked that, he would turn his attention - in no uncertain terms - to the question of symphonic architecture.

Performance-wise, it’s much the same tale as before: right at the outset, the pastoral tone - presumably representing workers peacefully working - is finely spun (those luscious clarinets again!), and the ensuing balalaika-like thrumming of strings - presumably representing workers downing hammers and sickles for the festivities - sounds as fresh as new paint. The ensuing whirl of merriment seems to go on for fun-filled ages, and to my ears Barshai never puts a foot wrong, even by the merest whisker. The playing of the WDRSO is vivid and alive in every bar, trumpets and horns in particular having a whale of a time. Towards the end of this allegro, there’s a comical passage for woodwind (shades of the composer’s contemporary The Age of Gold) which is deliciously done.

The allegro struts off into the distance, leaving behind what I imagine as nocturnal, vodka-induced hallucination: eerily groping high strings are punctuated by ’ecky thumps from drums and brass, and ghostly dancing veers from weird to wonderful by way of whacky - and that’s exactly how it’s played! Come the "dawn", and the shenanigans resumes, this time firmly in "Keystone Kops" territory with Barshai deftly choreographing the orchestra’s frenetic antics. Artfully vaulting from Shostakovich’s "chase" to "riding" mode, the conductor displays an almost equestrian proficiency, steering his surging stallion with a nudge of the heels here and a tug on the reins there. A big, bold climax triggers a drum roll over which jut jagged unison phrases (the birth of another Shostakovich trademark?). Shuddering basses, miry tuba, sonorous tam-tam, slithering strings conspire to lecture us on the bad old days - the cue for the chorus to make resonant pronouncements about "hoisting flags in the sun", and marching sturdily into a (sadly) fairly commonplace conclusion.

Good music, or bad music? Maybe here that’s not the question. Good performance or bad? Ah, that is the question! This orchestra may not have been born to play Shostakovich, but by golly it sounds like it. That is I suspect all due to Mr. Barshai, who leaves no stop un-pulled.

Symphony No. 4 op. 43 (written 1935-6, f.p. 1961)

Try to imagine what it would be like to sit down to breakfast one sun-soaked morning, basking in both sun and successful career, open the paper, and read that in your absence you have been tried and condemned for a crime that wasn’t even considered naughty when you did it. Worse, the "crime" is the very reason that you are successful and much admired by your peers. Bemused, you set off for work, only to see posters publicly displayed declaring you to be an "enemy of the people". A scenario so horrific and grotesque could only have come from Kafka, couldn’t it? Yet, this is precisely how Shostakovich’s honeymoon with the Soviet state ended - "in tears" doesn’t even begin to describe it.

The cause of all the fuss was not the Fourth Symphony (though had he got it out sooner, it might well have been), but what was his first really serious composition, the opera Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk District, which contains many of the elements that opera fans the world over have come to know and love - humiliation, violent sexual harassment, lust, jealousy, rape, whipping, murder by rat-poison, adultery, murder by strangulation and beating, drunkenness, bullying, murder by drowning, suicide by drowning. All good, clean fun? Not to the politically correct Mr. J. Stalin and his cohorts. Deciding that they knew what was best for the USSR, they undertook some draconian measures of ensuring that everyone followed their advice.

In a way, Shostakovich was lucky: while Meyerhold, the producer of Lady Mac., was "taken out" in 1940, Shostakovich survived - by keeping his head well down. Nape-tinglingly aware that the music of the Fourth Symphony had a distinct family resemblance to that of the opera, he withdrew it. There are two consequences that are usually glossed over. Firstly, regardless of anything else (like his skin), it must have hurt him like hell; the Fourth was his first unequivocally "great" symphony, a massive work of Mahlerian proportions over which he must have sweated blood. Secondly, in spite of the enraged bitterness of much of the music, this is still the product of that "honeymoon", and no matter how much it sounds like it ought to, there is no trace of the musical "subversion" that was to come. Thirdly ("NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!"), that in itself begs the question, "So what was the cause of all that enraged bitterness?" Now, that is the question - please write your answers on £5 notes and send to me c/o Musicweb!

Or, so I thought. Another version of the tale has it that Shostakovich became aware of the beginnings of Stalin’s first "Purge", which began in the confines of government and only gradually spread outwards, in the last few months of working on the Fourth. He wouldn’t feel the lash personally until the Lady Mac. debacle a few months after finishing the symphony, and although too late to influence the content of the symphony overall, it is likely that this awareness may have moved him to "tailor" its ending to reflect his feelings. If so, then this lends to the closing pages of the work a certain political significance that marks the beginning of his "career" (see Thirteenth Symphony!) as a musical subversive.

The Fourth Symphony’s first movement alone lasts as long as the whole of any of the first three symphonies, yet is so packed with extreme invention that its doesn’t seem like it - provided, that is, the conductor knows what he’s about. Doughty refers to the work’s "sprawling undisciplined mass of ideas" Hum. Granted, it is episodic, but the episodes do have a definite connective logic, and if this is not managed properly - preferably with an iron fist in a velvet glove - the whole thing does indeed rapidly deliquesce into a messy puddle on the floor.

Without going into detailed comparisons, I think I can safely say that Rudolf Barshai has given us a performance of this movement which can hold its head up in all but the most exalted company. His one misjudgement is not artistic but practical: the hurricane-force string-led fugue towards the end of the "development" is too fast - not for the players, who rip into it with gob-smacking venom, but simply because the acoustic and/or the microphones can’t comfortably resolve the seething cascades of notes! Admittedly, the players are clawing at (or maybe even a bit beyond) the limits of their capabilities, and the ensemble is thus a bit scrappy, but it doesn’t half get you onto the edge of your seat. That aside, with nary a tempo or tempo change that feels "forced", Barshai’s grip on the proceedings is iron-fistedly phenomenal but never, as befits a velvet glove, glaringly obvious.

Mind you, within this disciplined framework, the orchestra’s playing is as overheated as you could wish. The WDRSO players, as witness the above-mentioned string fugue, may not have the scalpel-bladed precision of Ormandy’s Philadelphians, but they more than make up for it with some truly gut-wrenching violence and finely-drawn bemused and desolate interstices, leaving you with the feeling that perhaps the most staggering thing about this movement is that Shostakovich had the gall to mark it simply allegretto poco moderato. "Allegretto" indeed - who does he think he’s kidding?

Significantly, the second movement is cast in that sine qua non of simple layouts, extended binary form, and its main subject bound by that most rigorous of compositional processes, the fugue. It wears its badge of allegiance to the Mahlerian Landler with justifiable pride. Barshai resolves the apparent conflict between moderato and the qualifying con moto to produce a dancing interlude that combines rustic delicacy and rumbustiousness, troubled only as the end of each main section approaches by surges of repressed bile. Barshai brings out a feeling that the composer was, for some reason best known to himself, gipping on his own sweet-meats. The players respond with evident affection, and the sheer sound that they make is a joy to hear - especially in the "tick-tock" percussion coda, recorded with crystal clarity, with its gently tramping basses, whirring violins, and delectable flute fluttertonguing.

The imposing canvas of the third and final movement is a more satisfying symphonic experience than either of the previous symphonies. Doughty suggests that it is in five sections - which we might call "Funeral March", "Allegro", "Waltz", "Scherzo" and "Peroration and Coda" - but doesn’t add that the "Scherzo" is embedded within the "Waltz", an important contributor to the movement’s symmetry and complementarity. Yet again, Barshai’s grasp of the music’s logic is impressive. Refusing to confuse the initial largo marking with adagio, he imposes a consistent onward flow and builds the pressure inexorably. The WDRSO respond by punching home the climax with doom-laden ferocity. In the sharply-etched "allegro", Barshai skilfully graduates the several ostinati, with one exception which he presents with rigid, maddening monotony: this ostinato, or its twin brother, will return to madden us again in the Eighth Symphony! If that were not enough, the ensuing build-up and climax are a distinct pre-echo of the finale of the Seventh.

In my book, nobody ever puts across the witty surrealism of the bibulous "Waltz" with quite the same style as Gennadi Roszdestvensky (heard live), though whether you’d want to live with his extreme exaggerations on CD is quite another matter. Veering, albeit less vertiginously, between ballroom and fairground, Barshai’s must surely be some sort of golden mean, coaxing some leery playing with (I would guess) a round of carefully measured tots of vodka - possibly confirmed by the increasingly hectic scramble of the "Scherzo".

The WDR SO blast out the "Peroration" to literally terrible effect, the two sets of antiphonally-placed tympani thundering murderously if with less than ideal precision - but at least the tymps. are antiphonally divided, unlike several other recordings (including Ormandy’s). I must admit that I prefer a tempo more like Haitink’s, with more majestic air around the angular figurations. Or at least I thought I did, until now: Barshai’s faster pulse sets the music thrashing about in a fit of furious rage. That may not only be equally valid, but also make a telling point out of what is generally just a passing observation.

The observation is that the wittering string ostinato, emerging from the tail end of the "Waltz", is a dead ringer for an effect in the third movement of Mahler’s Second. Alright, maybe lots of us know that already, but then consider the "Waltz/scherzo" from which it emerges. Doesn’t this equally parallel Mahler’s expressed commentary on the banalities and trivia of life? If so, then it follows (with impeccable logic!) that Shostakovich’s "Peroration" is his equivalent of Mahler’s "Cry of Disgust". This would account nicely for Barshai’s furioso frazzlemente approach. The thing is, once you accept that much, you start to wonder about parallels between Mahler’s and Shostakovich’s first two movements (go on, you do it!). The conclusion, and the reason for all Shostakovich’s anger (growing political awareness apart), might be that he is finally fed up to the back teeth with writing nothing but shed-loads of relatively trivial "gee up, folks, and let’s have fun" music. The symphony would thus appear to be a declaration of the motivations hiding behind Lady MacBeth’s skirts. The anguish of that public pillorying must have been privately doubled by having to choke this symphony at birth. That we can today enjoy the privilege of listening to it must, appropriately and retrospectively, make it Shostakovich’s Resurrection Symphony - a delicious irony!

How ironic then that it should end, not in triumphant affirmation, but inconclusive ethereal musing. The WDRSO’s gruff basses, unearthly woodwind, silken string lines, and liquid celeste all pulsing and shining as if from some realm a million miles away. Shostakovich, like Arthur C. Clarke’s Star-Child, is "not sure what he would do next, but he would think of something".

Symphony No. 5 op. 47 (1937)

That "something" was the Fifth Symphony. Doughty makes the traditional statement that Shostakovich gave it the title "A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism", and follows it up with the traditional argument. The trouble is that this is no longer as cut-and-dried as it once was. The facts are that Shostakovich worked his socks off to produce this symphony A.S.A.P. (and P.D.Q!), and that he adopted a conventional four movement layout in the "accepted" manner.

Having been publicly shamed by the State via the state-controlled press, having been labelled a public enemy (which carried the "sentence" of being unemployable), having become aware of the unnerving tendency of outspoken people to "disappear", and having hurriedly hoicked his latest and biggest symphony out of rehearsals, Shostakovich must have felt somewhat insecure, exposed, and in fear for his life. Clearly, he had to do something post haste to get the b******s off his back.

In these post-Testimony days, it seems likely that, yes, he did write the Fifth for this express purpose but, no, he didn’t give it that cringing boot - or worse! - licking title. It’s all very complicated, but this much is "certain": Shostakovich pulled off a miracle of escapology fully worthy of Harry Houdini, and moreover one that not only restored his public standing but also did so without compromising his private and passionate integrity. Yet, even with the inherent ambiguity of Music as a means of communicating messages, the path Shostakovich started down was fraught with risk - small wonder, then, that Shostakovich would not include words in a symphony for the next 25 years.

Coming to this symphony directly from the Fourth, I made one discovery which was (for me at any rate) very striking. Listen to the counter-subject of the Fourth Symphony’s second movement, then the first movement of the Fifth. If the first subject isn’t deliberately derived from the melody of that counter-subject, and the pulsing accompaniment of the second subject from its rhythm, then I’ll eat my hat. I could be wrong (just in case, I have a large and extremely mouth-watering chocolate hat standing by!). It’s as if Shostakovich had stoically scraped the unsullied butter off a piece of bread that had been knocked out of his hand and spread it, more thinly and with great resolve, onto a fresh slice. Thus, it would seem, his now-disguised anger was set reverberating in the Fifth Symphony, to mingle with other "coded messages". From here on, we can no longer take anything at face value.

The Fifth is without doubt Shostakovich’s best-known and most frequently-performed symphony. There are well over 50 recordings currently in the catalogue and, if the form-book’s anything to go by, a fair number pending reissue. I’ve lost count of the renditions I’ve heard of this music - first hearing courtesy of Stokowski, (mis-) spent youth with an oft-played Kertesz LP, joined in recent years by Levi’s reliable rendition - and just about all of them go off the rails at some point or other. Memories of the Stokowski have, sadly, vanished into the murk, but I remain convinced that Kertesz was, in the final analysis, too lightweight overall and his coda too skittish, while Levi takes an eternity over the largo and his sound is a bit hard. Others, whom I shall decline to name and shame, have for example galloped across the second movement as if it was a racetrack. With such a huge surfeit of riches (and rags) not only are we spoilt rotten for choice, but also it’s unlikely that Barshai can find anything to tell us that we don’t know already. In all fairness, he doesn’t. But what he does do is give us a performance where virtually all the "right" things are there at once, and leaves himself no room at all to get anything wrong.

Take the very opening: where Levi (and others without number) slip the string canon past us like it’s on well-oiled castors, under Barshai’s baton the WDRSO strings sound like they’re carved out of granite - a real declaration of implacable intent. Having thus grabbed your attention by the throat, the mobile moderato of the first subject is all the more arresting. Barshai refuses to linger, unswervingly focussed on the music’s single propulsive arch. Phrases are pointedly articulated, the sound edging towards (but remaining crucially this side of) brittle, and lending some edge to my suspicions about the provenance of some of the materials. The huge climax is brilliantly controlled, although the strident clattering of the xylophone for some unaccountable reason just doesn’t cut through like it should. Barshai doesn’t make a meal of the massive unisons of the recapitulation which, surely, you’d expect to dissipate the suspense? Not a bit of it! The high tension is actually maintained, so that the denouement of baleful bass brasses over (or under) a towering tam-tam is truly terrific. The coda is also a marvel: the slightly saccharine solo violin versus the gruff ground of the bass line, ethereal but earthbound, draws an intriguing question mark.

I’ve heard conductors bustle through the second movement as if it were the Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture. Even of those who take it at something like the "right" speed, most manage to make it sound too glossy, too urbane. I’m pretty well convinced that Shostakovich had in mind something on the lines of Mahler’s "gemachlichen landler", and that is exactly how Barshai takes it: the double-basses grunt and chug with an utter lack of sophistication, the clarinet howls and prances, and in the trio section the solo violin quite obviously - and quite properly - has Mahler’s "Death takes the fiddle" in the back of his mind. To cap it all, the booming climaxes have a welly-shod swing that has me thinking, "Sup a couple of pints o’ best, and you could actually dance to this!"

The slow movement is marked largo, but while Barshai makes darned sure it doesn’t dawdle, it starts in a spacious, awe-filled hush, with a nicely-judged blend of strings. The playing is so heartfelt, the instrusive dissonance so heartbreaking, that I couldn’t care one jot about a flute entry that was a whole quarter of a beat late (it actually sounds like a "catch" in the throat!). The build-ups to the climaxes are hackle-raising, growing out of the WDRSO’s gorgeous sub-basement. There are some lovely sounds: chilling tremolandos, mellow clarinets and bassoons, the xylophone has woken up with a vengeance, and right in the middle I hear more clearly than I can recollect the shade of VW’s Tallis Fantasia. If it sounded like this, then regardless of any political import it’s not surprising that the audience at the first performance was moved to tears.

The finale is supposed to explode attacca. It doesn’t quite, but it does explode! Starting off slap-bang in the middle of the required allegro non troppo, Barshai’s long-term control of the ever more hectic tempo had me wondering what make of binoculars he used. By the time the big catastrophe arrives, at the very heart of the movement, panic is rife. Yet, for all the mounting hysteria, the orchestra’s articulation is purposeful and strong, so that you can sometimes even hear the tonguing. The quiet episode, which Gerard MacBurney has revealingly linked to the recently discovered song, setting meaningfully apposite words by Pushkin about a vandalised oil-painting, is itself beautifully painted, and the contentious coda emerges in a huge, controlled, brutally punctuated release of energy. Barshai broadens the tempo for a crunching conclusion that should satisfy both those who think Shostakovich’s victory is "forced" and those who think it’s genuine - and those who see it as a big, black question-mark.. One thing is unquestionable - this is a cracking performance.

Symphony No. 6 op. 54 (1939)

Following the bilateral success of the Fifth, it looks like Shostakovich warmed to his two-faced task. In 1938, he went so far as to announce in print his intention to "set in sound the immortal images of Lenin" in a symphony on the same lines as Beethoven’s Ninth. Yet, when the Sixth Symphony hit the streets, there were no vocal soloists and no massed choirs. Instead of the expected Beethovenian monument to the founding father of the Soviet State there was just this lop-sided, three movement curiosity which sets out making all the right preparatory noises but then "comes off the rails" in a big way. People were puzzled. Quite frankly, so am I. In all the writings about what’s come to light in recent years I haven’t yet come across anything remotely like a convincing explanation of just what Shostakovich thought he was playing at.

Dr. David Doughty sounds as puzzled as I am. He finds the huge opening largo "tragic, solemn and lyrical by turns, something of an extension of the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony and claimed by early critics to be a portrait of Lenin" (I presume that these were "critics for the defence"!). However, he gives vent to what I imagine is a frustration similar to mine by dismissing the two short scherzi that make up the balance (or "imbalance") of the work as throwbacks to Shostakovich’s earlier "vaudeville" style, even (and this strikes me as moderately bizarre!) measuring the finale against Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony. Maybe I’m influenced by the interpretation I know best, that of Paavo Berglund with the estimable Bournemouth SO (EMI), but I find these two movements more than anything put me in mind of a "bum’s rush". So, maybe this is Shostakovich making a macabre joke: tell them you’re building a monument to Lenin, build up their expectations with an imposing veil of a first movement, and when the veil is pulled off they are confronted by a statue which, thumb to round red nose, blows them a razzberry, and moreover a razzberry with meaning?

The very beginning is often described as "pastoral" in mood. Well, it was nothing of the sort with Berglund, and it most certainly isn’t in Barshai’s hands. Sure, the opening phrases are aspiring and the unison strings and woodwind sound mellow, but the belly-lifting drop at the end of the second phrase and the subsequent contrast of acrid high frequencies soon knock any such cosy "pastoral" notions on the head. In fact, Barshai seems to drill right into the heart of this music. For the first third or so of its running time it is massively miserable, and Barshai’s engineering of the climaxes is blood-curdling in its intensity. The WDRSO’s sonic response is fully up to it, which is more than can be said for the poor, beleaguered microphones at a couple of particularly stressful points in an otherwise exemplary recording. Amongst numerous superlatives, I really must single out the horns who sail majestically over a couple of heaving climaxes.

Gradually, the fire dies down, and it is here that Barshai is most impressive, gripping our attention through every second of the music’s long, sleepless night. This is haunted by the ghost of Mahler, whose Wunderhorn-inspired funereal world Shostakovich almost literally copies, especially in the hollow clang of harp and tamtam. But Shostakovich adds something of his very own, a monotonously whirring eternity of string trilling that chills the blood every bit as much as it had formerly been curdled. Then the bright-eyed tinkling of celeste and glockenspiel ushers in a chorale of mellow horns and woodwind: could this be the sun rising, bring a new day and new hope? No, even the glitter becomes oppressive. The music’s blooming into semi-optimism is defeated by a sour horn chord, and the music subsides into deathly stillness. This "pastoralism" is a bit short on buttercups and daisies.

After this, I can’t imagine taking the two short, quick movements as simply "Shostakovich having fun". By the sounds of it, neither can Barshai. He whips the whirling woodwind and pizzicato strings remorselessly, whisking the frolicsome materials into a fearsome climax of unbridled aggression. The WDRSO is brimming with vitality and urgency, trumpets and percussion crisp and with crackling articulation of the stammering rhythms. If we are reminded of Shostakovich’s comment to the effect that "smiling at everyone in the street was compulsory", then the course of the movement following the ominous tamtam wallop and hammering tympani is logical: the same cheery music continues, only now somehow "dimmer", with even the piccolo sounding "muted". The dissolution into puppet-like disfigurement is finely crafted, and the sheer sound of the tapping of the tympani at the tail-end is a moment of magic.

Barshai’s grip doesn’t slip even for a moment: he launches the finale at a seemingly carefree gallop, all apparently pinky and perky. There are maybe occasional awkward moments in the tricky phrasing, but the all-important momentum is spot-on. Equally spot-on is the way the music is made to falter following the relentless central climax. Woodwind and strings grope blindly, a solo violin casting around for the way back to the reprise. Barshai may lack the out-and-out manic aggression of Berglund, but his gradual conversion of the cheerful chuntering into that "bum’s rush", propelled against its wishes and with increasing insistence towards the door marked "exit", nevertheless captures the essential and unnerving feeling of being forcibly detached from one’s hinges. But, if you prefer to regard this as simply a Keystone Kops-style romp, then go right ahead: the playing and recording are rumbustious and brilliant enough for just about anybody’s taste.

Symphony No. 7 "Leningrad" op. 60 (1941)

Can any symphony have had more chequered history than this one? Yes, probably, but it does take some beating. Shostakovich may have been less than enamoured by the Uncle Joe and his Supreme Soviet, but he loved his country to the extent that, as soon as another loveable old rogue (Uncle Adolf) threatened his home he went straight round to his local recruiting office. Fortunately, for posterity at least, he was considered to be a short-sighted drip (from the active military service point of view) and instead ended up doing service as a voluntary fire-fighter (in itself hardly a job best suited to "short-sighted drips").

The legend of the birth of this symphony is the stuff of spy-stories. It was composed amid the horrors of the siege of Leningrad, where (it is said) its composer defied the air raids to continue his task. Its value as both propaganda-piece and contribution to the Allied war effort was immediately recognised by the Soviet authorities (who, it must be said, had thus far failed abysmally to comprehend anything of his), and so the score was microfilmed and smuggled, presumably at appalling risk, to the West. Almost overnight, no doubt aided by the titles given to the movements, it became an icon of the war against fascism.

Within a few years the rot set in. Bartok squeezed a biting parody of the infamous "Nazi March" into his Concerto for Orchestra. However, this was not so much a comment on the music itself as on what Bartok saw as the over-hyped media-dotage it "enjoyed". Once the war was won, and the West became increasingly suspicious of the Soviet, then the backlash against the music began. It was "recognised" for what it "really" was - banal, bombastic, over-inflated, poster-painted commie propaganda of the worst sort (was none of the millions who had previously feted it embarrassed at having done so?). Moreover, multitudes of learned scholars oozed out of the woodwork and onto the band-wagon to condemn it as ill-conceived, over-scored, badly structured - you name it: for any and every reason, this was bad music, and concert promoters dropped it like a hot brick. Before long, it suffered the same fate in Russia, though for entirely different reasons.

It wasn’t until after the appearance of Solomon Volkov’s controversial Testimony, which started a rash of re-appraisals, that the Seventh began to undergo a process of rehabilitation. It now seems to be far more sensibly evaluated as a "flawed masterpiece", though whether it "represents" Shostakovich’s feelings about his country and the threat of the invading Nazis, or his country and the threat of its own totalitarian regime, is still a bone of contention. Absolutely brilli-bump, I reckon. Through all this almighty how’s-your-father, the one thing that hasn’t changed one iota is the music itself! When I first heard it about forty years ago (oh, gawd, is it that long?), as a teenager utterly ignorant of its history or meaning, I was bowled over by this symphony. Now, when I hear it, as a "middle-ager" less than ignorant of its history or meaning ("true" or otherwise), I am still bowled over by this symphony. Not that I wish to seem in the least bit biased, you understand! Of course, this begs the now-common question: is an understanding of Shostakovich’s motives and codings a prerequisite for the appreciation of his music? The short answer is, emphatically, "no" - though it does help a bit.

Over the years, I have heard a good many different performances, ranging from Toscanini’s pioneering "off-air" recording (with sound quality that redefines the adjective "execrable") through the rugged Berglund recording with which I choose to live, taking in more recent views expressed by such as Wigglesworth, to the extraordinary experience of the Slaithwaite Philharmonic under Adrian Smith (the recording of this performance I made myself, with sound quality that redefines the adjective "mediocre"!). I think I can safely say that the WDRSO and Rudolf Barshai give as fine a performance as any I’ve heard - not perfect, mind, but then is anything?

They give us a good, sturdy opening, forthright and assertive but without the belligerence it often gets. This is important, isn’t it? If we are to accept Shostakovich’s scheme, this music equates to "care-free workers in the fields and factories", presumably in the halcyon days of the first three symphonies. Barshai underpins this approach by keeping the softer music light: the flute warbles happily, the woodwind chorale is rich and restful, and the idyllic violins get as near to dancing as makes no difference. The "Nazi" march, which can be viewed as a vast "introduction" to the volcanic development (and is thus very nearly as much of a "rude interruption" as in Bartok’s subsequent skit), becomes all the more aggressive by contrast. Listening on headphones, I got the feeling from slight changes of tone and perspective that the two snare drums were sharing the duty in the earlier stages (or was this an accident of editing of different takes?). Strangely, Barshai doesn’t make as much as I’d expected of the harmonic clashes of violins and horns in the accompaniment, but otherwise he builds the disaster with almost cinematic dramatic flair. Like most, he speeds up a bit towards the climax, but then refuses to exaggerate the broadening out, and keeps the pressure on. In the aftermath, the flute has lost its warble, and the chorus of woodwind sounds drier. I don’t think this is accidental.

The second movement (again!) finds a near-ideal tempo, lolloping daintily. The oboe in the second subject sounds appropriately fruity, complementing some soulful cellos. Plaudits must go to the palpably straining clarinet in the central episode where Barshai tautens the tempo, but not too much. Interestingly, the brass and drums at the climax are almost romping, as Barshai resists the temptation to get vicious. Quite right, too! Shostakovich, initially inclined to call this movement "Reminiscences", was I think harping back rather further than the climax of the first movement. The creamy bass clarinet and fluttery flutes are a delight, as is the finely graduated fade at the close.

By this token, Barshai prepares for the opening of the third movement, softer-grained than Berglund, and yielding to great tenderness in the strings, and a flute that really sings. The fast core of the movement, whilst not as fast as some, lashes out and packs some wicked punches from the WDRSO horns, with the bottom end of the brass tramping in army boots - a vivid image of a peaceful people aggravated by an invader (whether from without or within!). Having endowed the "Spanish-flavoured" passage with thunderous excitement, Barshai goes on to bring out some truly foreboding percussion parts right at the end, subtly enhancing his preparation of the finale.

Opening mysteriously, but threaded with an immediate sense of purpose, Barshai’s finale is a tour de force. He builds the first climax majestically, and with a real feeling of expectancy, so that when the cymbals clash, the effect is electrifying. The ensuing "jolly tune" is given added edge by the unusually evident carpet of pulsating drums. The prayerful central passage literally throbs with emotion, helped by some impressive horn trills. As I am by now coming to expect, Barshai’s grip on the long final crescendo is sure, so that when the denouement arrives it packs a terrific wallop. The triumphant reprise of the main subject of the first movement finds the added brass antiphonally distinguished - a very effective touch - whilst the final chord, emerging out of the sudden blackness of gathering storm-clouds, is actually capped by the orchestra. Normally, this either just "holds on" or (perish the thought!) falls limp by comparison. Not so here!

I had some suspicions that this might have been taken from live performances, as there are some "noises off", though I hasten to add that there’s nothing to write home about. The recording is excellent, full and wide-ranging and with little congestion in the more bruising episodes. The playing is magnificent, and the interpretation (as I’ve suggested) provides sufficient food for thought to seriously worry the "hackney-mongers".

Symphony No. 8 op. 65 (1943)

Before he had finally polished off the finale of the Seventh, Shostakovich was hoicked out of the beleaguered Leningrad, and moved to the comparative safety of Moscow to finish his work. This looked suspiciously like a caring attitude on the part of the authorities. However, as Shostakovich himself was something of a thorn in their sides, we must conclude - bearing in mind the cloak-and-dagger mode of its dissemination - that what they were really after was the Seventh, or more precisely its anticipated propaganda value.

With scarcely a pause for breath, Shostakovich got stuck into the composition of the Eighth, which turned out to be unremittingly gloomy and laden with the grimmest foreboding. The reaction to its first performance (under Mravinsky) was hardly surprising: puzzlement, confusion - and ominous rumblings of accusation: noises on the lines of "Why, when the tide of the war is turning, does he not write something to encourage our valiant workers and warriors?" Why indeed, especially when he had, so to speak, already experienced the rough edge of Uncle Joe’s tongue?

According to Ian MacDonald, the reason is this: Shostakovich had believed that Uncle Joe & Co. were specifically purging Leningrad of its overpreponderance of "liberals", free-thinking individualists who were reluctant to genuflect. On being moved to Moscow, he realised that this barbarism was actually infecting the entire country. Shostakovich was utterly appalled, quite literally "speechless with rage", to the extent that he threw caution to the wind and penned a singularly explicit message in his new symphony. However, I don’t think this happened suddenly. It begins to look like the first three movements of the Seventh might after all be doing "what it says on the tin", while the finale (written largely in Moscow) expresses this growing realisation: maybe we should hearken more attentively to the covert crawling of the opening subject, that becomes a battering ram to spoil the victory celebrations of the coda?

Since about 1966 I have possessed an LP recording of this work. A Melodiya import, it came in a plain cardboard box adorned only with a black-and-white photograph of an acorn (?). The two discs, thick slabs of armour-plated vinyl (they don’t make ‘em like that any more!), contain some of the most execrably-engineered monophonic sound I’ve ever heard. They enshrine a "live" performance although, judging by the din in the auditorium, some of the audience were in a pretty terminal condition. But the performance itself, given by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Evgeny Mravinsky, is completely transfixing! From damp, grey hopelessness through biting sarcasm to vicious vitriol, it has in my ears never been bettered. The reason, I guess, has something to do with the fact that these peerless performers had lived through the self-same oppression as the composer - and at the time still crouched in its dreadful shadow.

Hoping to hear more detail from a modern recording, I eventually supplemented it with the highly-recommended LSO/Previn CD. This was good, very good in fact, but compared to the old LPs it came across as warm, rounded, and positively snuggly - raising the age-old question of whether you have to live through something to properly express it. So, here I am, again holding out high hopes of a high fidelity equivalent to that old Melodiya set and, well, Rudolf Barshai at least has the prerequisite experience. Maybe it’s too much to expect that he would match that old Mravinsky recording, but for this pair of ears at least he knocks Previn (and Haitink, for that matter) into the proverbial cocked hat.

The strings at the opening set the tone, forcefully grinding out the theme then, as if exhausted by the sheer effort, sinking back into sorrowful song. This entire threnody is beautifully articulated, though again the piercing intensity of the high violins and flute/piccolo unisons turns out to be a mite more than the mics. can take. Although falling short of the implacable rage of Mravinsky, Barshai builds the colossal crisis of the "central" climax with volcanic inevitability (if there is such a thing. OK, there is now!). Whilst the "march" episode has all the clout of lead-lined boxing-gloves, his outlining of the three-note phrases, over those roaring drum-rolls, is perhaps not jagged enough, but then the shimmering string tremolando that terminates this devastating outburst is utterly stunning. The bleakness of the ensuing recitatives is chilling - it’s just a shame that the WDRSO trumpets don’t quite scald the ear-drums like the Leningraders do.

There’s one footnote to this movement: curiously, I’ve never heard it mentioned, but there are astonishing parallels with the first movement of the Fifth. It’s as if Shostakovich had re-used the same mould, so that it sounds like he’s giving us the same message - only now of course he’s expressing not the lot of one city, but of an entire nation.

The two scherzi are nigh on faultless. In the second movement, the orchestra bring off their phrase-end crescendi superbly, menacing surges ensuring that nobody is fooled by the "up-beat" sound of the music. The feeling of "puppets outwardly conforming, inwardly screaming" is palpable, although the screeching woodwind are, for once, a little subdued (where Mravinsky’s forces sound like they must have given themselves hernias). Although the final climax is built with wicked intent, the WDRSO tambourinist is no match for his Leningrad counterpart, who punches the poor instrument so hard it penetrates even that murky old recording! These are, however, all relative - by any normal standards this is superbly played.

If the second movement represents "puppets", the incessant, merciless jabbering of the third must relate to the "string-pullers". But, however you interpret it, there’s no doubt that Shostakovich intended that "merciless", and any conductor who takes off like a frightened gazelle is surely missing the point. Barshai opens at a deliberate tempo, by which I mean just nicely slow enough so’s they don’t have to ease back to accommodate the less agile trombones when they take up the maddening ostinato. If you want to hear how horribly damaging this is, try Previn, who ignores the composer’s cautionary non troppo and "pratfalls" straight into this particular puddle. Again there’s some wonderful playing: the violas at the start have an oaken hue that is spine-tingling, whilst the "oom-pah" section in the trio has a whale of a time. It’s very much a movement of two halves. Each half starts with that nagging nattering. The first half ends with a sarcasm of "circus" music, creating an expectation for the ending of the second half which is savagely broken - and for this reason I don’t think that there should be any obvious "special" build-up. At the very end of the movement, where the tempo breaks, Barshai coaxes a right old racket from the players, and the tam-tam is given some real stick. It sounds like the end of the world ...

... and that’s very apposite, because he makes the fourth movement sound like the world has come to an end! This morbid passacaglia bears the full weight of the hopelessness of the incarcerated on its shoulders The strings of the WDRSO sound as if they have had all the colour blanched out of them, the solo horn sounds exhausted, the solo piccolo’s melisma hesitates as if half-forgotten, and the woodwind fluttertonguings have an acrid reek. That might sound bad, but it isn’t. In refusing to apply any sheen of cosmetics to the music’s sound, Barshai skewers its soul. The simple, unstressed modulation with which Shostakovich slips into his finale is like the proverbial shaft of sunlight through the prison bars. A mood of tentative celebration develops, gradually growing more confident until its surging festivity awakens the "dragon" of the first movement, leaving us in no doubt that the time for dancing in the streets is not yet. Stunned and bemused, the dancers slowly melt into the mist. The hushed coda, almost in fear of reaching its resolution sounds like nothing more than a chastened hand groping stealthily for some imagined shred of hope, and finally grasping it, holding it, and cherishing it. For all its massive outrage, the Eighth ends on a more optimistic note than does the Seventh, for all its pomp and bombast.

On the bridge between the third and fourth movements, I stopped comparing Barshai with Mravinsky, because looking forward from that bridge the panorama presented by Barshai matches that of the Master, and Barshai and his WDRSO players capture the import of the music with equal eloquence.

Symphony No. 9 op. 70 (1945)

For forty days (and possibly forty nights) did Shostakovich toil on the score of his Ninth Symphony. More succinctly, and with rather less biblical ambiguity, he had the whole thing sown up in under six weeks flat. Nevertheless he did have a problem with it, though this was not writing the music, but deciding what to write. He had aroused the Allies with his Seventh, perplexed the Proletariat and the Politburo with his Eighth, and now with the War won and the "magic" number nine hovering on the threshold of his oeuvre, many - particularly certain occupiers of high places whom he despised with all his heart - were expecting a Russian victory hymn to challenge the mighty Ninth Symphony of Beethoven.

Shostakovich was in a right old quandary. Should he do the expected, and be seen to kow-tow? Should he seem to kow-tow, and subvert the surface celebration with some secret code? Did he even want to challenge Beethoven’s Ninth? Suppose he tried (either way) and flopped? Then again, there were the ordinary folk of Russia, the brave, long-suffering people, the life-blood of the homeland he so loved: these people above all he did not want to let down. What was he to do? The answer he found was completely gob-smacking in its brilliance: to the people he gave the joy and celebration - and commemoration - they deserved, and to the masters he gave his challenge to the perceived supremacy of Beethoven. Only it was not Russia’s answer to the mighty Ninth, but Russia’s answer to the flighty Eighth!

The people, it seemed, loved it, but it comes as no surprise that Caesar was hardly over the moon with what had been rendered unto him. Shostakovich was sailing dangerously close to the wind, and the weather was about to take a distinct turn for the worse: by 1948 the innocent Ninth would be one of the works outlawed by the Zhdanov decree. Innocent? Yes. Despite David Doughty’s reference to "surface gaiety", implying a concealed subtext, to the best of my knowledge not one expert (revisionist or otherwise) has unearthed the slightest hint of any "subversion". My impression is that, to all intents and purposes, Shostakovich made his subversive point through an entire lack of ambiguity. He gave voice to the simple feelings - happiness, relief, and indeed loss - of the people who had resisted and vanquished an "enemy without", and he had ignored the desire of the Soviet State, by implication an "enemy within", for its extravagant vehicle of self-aggrandisement.

The key to successful performance of this, Shostakovich’s equivalent of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony (there’s even a first movement exposition repeat!), is directness and simplicity. The places where some conductors tend to "drop their pants" are the second and fourth movements. And the reason is generally because they stuff more emotional baggage into their pockets than their belts can reasonably support. On my old and by now somewhat dog-eared LP, no less a conductor than Kondrashin, whose performance is otherwise in every respect thrilling, overloads the music on the emotional front. Or, I should add, finds a joke where there really isn’t one. I’m referring to the short fourth movement. Sure, the bassoon’s first two notes give a momentary impression of the start of the Grand Declamation of Beethoven’s Ninth, but this is surely no more than an aside, a passing sly dig at the pompous Party dignitaries. I don’t think there’s any intention on Shostakovich’s part to make the rest of it funny, but performers (perhaps taken in by the surrounding gaiety) can make it so by parodistic inflection.

Barshai homes in like a peregrine falcon on Shostakovich’s first movement tempo: as any Italian will (I believe) tell you, allegro means "jolly" or "happy". Barshai does not rush the music off its feet: the first subject bustles merrily and the second positively bounces along. Thanks to some delightfully natty, chatty strings and woodwind, notes and phrases are classically clear and focussed, and everything is audible - including the percussion. That’s one touch I particularly like - the tymps in the second subject are hit hard, but the effect is robustly playful rather than aggressive. Even the straining harmonies towards the end of the development sound not so much stressful as plain, old-fashioned "tipsy".

The second movement is marked moderato, but like the correspondingly marked movement of Mahler’s Sixth it has often been given a portentous adagio treatment - almost as if conductors were unconsciously trying to salvage something of the Ninth that had been expected. In Barshai’s hands, the lilting clarinet tune really does lilt, and the music becomes charmingly wistful. The heavier, upwardly treading refrain, elsewhere imbued with menace, here sounds about as threatening as an overgrown cuddly bunny because Barshai ever so slightly accelerates into it, generating a slightly "lolloping" feel. The effect is of someone musing by a fireside, thinking back to the bad times, at first with increasing regretfulness but then with a sigh of relief that it’s over over and done with. The wonderful grading and shading of the textures and dynamics by the WDRSO conjure this image a real treat: there is proper sweetness in the relief.

Presto, the man asks, and presto he gets, though nota bene it’s not prestissimo. The result is a scherzo full of dash and verve, but allowing the woodwind to sound as clear and sparkling as spring water, brass and drums bouncing and boisterous, and the strings bringing sharp incisiveness to those rapidly repeated notes in the trio section. The gradual cessation of festivities for the solemn memorial of the largo fourth movement is seemingly seamless, so that the hiatus just before the brass pronouncement is real hold-your-breath stuff. To my mind, those octave heavy brass have never been better than here: absolutely on the button, a brick wall of sound balanced like one of those ripe Russian men’s choruses. Spine-tingling. The ensuing bassoon soliloquy is the heart of the symphony, the heartfelt playing of the WDRSO principal almost "speaking" its personal remembrance for the fallen. So, in a celebratory symphony, it is only right and proper that the same voice eventually ends this "two minutes’ silence" to kick off the celebrations.

The finale is one of those rare movements where I wish I had a score to hand (I normally feel that referring to the score, which is by no means an absolute, is somehow "cheating"). I can remember reading a review of the Kondrashin when it first appeared about thirty years ago: a glowing review, but with a question mark over Kondrashin’s sudden, huge accelerando for the build-up to the climax, with an equally drastic deceleration into the climax itself. It always did sound a bit contrived (blisteringly exciting, to be sure, but nevertheless contrived!), and I don’t recall anyone else indulging in such an acrobatic feat. Until now, that is, because blow me if Barshai doesn’t do the self-same thing! Well, very nearly: Barshai cranks up the tempo, more subtly, right from the word "go", and thus when he takes off it’s nowhere near as much "like the clappers". Oddly, though, the last couple of bars before the climax itself mark the low spot of the performance: having pulled back on the reins, Barshai then keeps slightly too tight a hold. Either that, or he should have pulled back just a nadge more so that his "release" had more effect. It’s only marginal - and it’s only momentary: the climax itself is as breezy as a village band, and the coda romps away as bright and fizzy as you could wish. As I’ve implied already, the recording is exemplary, full-bodied yet clear as a bell.

Symphony No. 10 op. 93 (1953)

Following the war, the totalitarian vice was screwed even tighter, apparently a kindly gesture on the part of Uncle Joe to ensure that the people didn’t naively confuse "victory" with "freedom". Shostakovich, for his "crime" of giving joy to the people rather than an Ode to Joy to the State, was censured. His Ninth Symphony, incredibly, was supposed to have failed to "reflect the true spirit of the Russian people" (of course, it depends on whose definition of "true spirit" you are using). In 1948 the mounting storm-clouds broke, and the Russian artistic community was drenched by the downpour of the Zhdanov Purge, from which not even the likes of Prokofiev were safe. True to form, Shostakovich’s resolve grew even firmer. Dutifully, he kept his head down and appeared to devote himself to churning out sweet-meats to appease the State. Significantly, this time round there was no major work by way of "apology": his silence on this front was eloquent.

Whether, as Doughty suggests, Shostakovich actually waited for Stalin to die before starting on any further major works, or simply kept what work he did quietly tucked away for that "rainy day", is now probably neither here nor there. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the latter would be more in character, and certainly the first movement of his Tenth Symphony sounds like the sort of music he might well have written to while away the sleepless nights during that grim period. He somehow contrives to make what is just about the most closely-argued symphonic movement he ever wrote come strangely close to music for a film scene: I can readily imagine, in the sombre-hued opening passage, the composer restlessly pacing in the gloom of his room, pausing (perhaps by his bag packed ready in case of the "knock on the door"), then pacing again. As the music progresses, so his thoughts cluster and coagulate: helplessness, fear, resentment, all coalesce into boiling, bitter and impotent anger. This dissipates into weariness; facing the window in the growing dawn he sees no hope in the cold, grey light. This is far more than Doughty’s summarial and generalised "repression and frustration": it is a profoundly personal expression of what life was like not just for Shostakovich himself but for millions of individual people. I don’t know about you, but I can lose sleep just thinking about it.

Parts of this performance failed to come up to my accumulated expectations. Right at the outset the bass strings didn’t produce the oil-black sound I already knew they could generate. Right in the middle of the climax, the pounding drums seemed to muddle their rhythms. Yet there were compensations, like the hopeless, helpless, lopsided "waltzing" woodwind, or the looming inevitability engendered by Barshai’s rugged sense of the music’s architecture. Where others, including such as Svetlanov, generate crackling high voltages, Barshai exudes a slight odour of detachment which although not as physically exciting you may feel is more in keeping with the sentiments - assuming, that is, you go along with my "scenario".

In the context of that "scenario" the second movement - which I notice Shostakovich does not call a "scherzo"! - starts to make more sense. It’s a strange movement. I reckon that most of us would expect an "evil tyrant" to be represented by something slow, inexorably grinding, and with lots of lurky bass and nasty discords. But Shostakovich "represents" Stalin as the political equivalent of a runaway train, roaring headlong towards an unfortunate (for him) encounter with some unforeseen set of buffers. Of course (I realise, somewhat belatedly), if the evil tyrant had had the Populus panic-stricken and running round like headless chickens, then this movement would have been as expected. But Stalin didn’t do that - he stifled activity so that, as per the first movement, nobody dared move. Stalin was the one who did all the moving, drowning all in torrents of his own maniacal energy - and I think we’re hardly taken aback to find that the main theme (woodwind) is none other than the dark spectre that haunted the first movement. In this movement, Barshai and the WDRSO players crank up the voltage as well as more or less anybody: no fumbly drumming here - the snare-drummer especially unleashing salvoes of wrist-cracking machine-gun fire. Then, in the passage just before the tension breaks and the volume drops to next to nothing, they go off the boil. I was about to express disappointment when I remembered two things: firstly, Barshai’s intimate involvement in this business, and secondly my "runaway train". This is not so much a "portrait of Stalin" as a "precis of Stalin’s ‘career’" - a crescendo of megalomaniac aggression becoming a murderous frenzy, thence to stagnation, just as nasty but bereft of ideas on new ways to be nasty, so takes deep breath, plunges recklessly onwards, hits buffers, The End. Again, it strikes me that Barshai has declined maximum "viscerality" in favour of a bit of "Soviet realism".

It’s now that you’d expect Shostakovich to launch into his finale, expressing triumph over the fallen tyrant. But he doesn’t. Instead there’s this enigmatic allegretto, leaning towards the "landler" style movements in the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. Is it just an intermezzo, or is there something more? Well, of course there is, in the form of Shostakovich’s celebrated DSCH musical "signature". After the portrait of the defunct tyrant, the portrait of the subversive rebel, perhaps? Very likely something on those lines: the DSCH motto is first heard as if creeping out from under cover (first subject), and then prancing more confidently (second subject). It’s hard to avoid the image of Shostakovich high-stepping gleefully on the grave of the fallen tyrant! As the cavorting subsides into musing, there appears on the crest of a surge a new theme, a horn call which will reappear another eleven times, always the same (dynamics apart). It is thought that this is another "signature", representing Elmira Nazirova, a pupil of Shostakovich’s in 1947, with whom he developed some sort of clandestine infatuation, or at least idealised admiration, which continued well beyond the appearance of this symphony. I think that there’s a bit more to it than just that. Listen to the music: immediately this theme is heard, the music returns to the nocturnal brooding, and that "spectre of Stalin", from the first movement (hardly a romantic reminiscence). Further horn calls elicit differing responses - a light woodwind chorale that’s a wistful derivation of the second subject, angelic flutings suggesting that we can now see Hope through that window, and the "corpse of the spectre" in plodding pizzicati. The first subject creeps back, gradually becoming more urgent. The second subject positively slams in, at first clumping in hob-nailed boots, but getting wilder and wilder, until DSCH and the horn call resound jubilantly over the din before they tiptoe off together into the "new dawn". I’m not claiming that this is the answer, but it is for me (at least until I think of something better) an answer: here is where Shostakovich announces his "personal" victory. For him, Elmira’s youth is a constant symbol of that Hope, purging the evil ghost of the tyrant he’s outlived, and giving him the courage to stamp its vile embers into the dust.

As so often, Barshai seems to underplay the drama yet, again "as so often", there’s a real thinking brain at work (and I don’t mean to suggest that everybody else isn’t thinking!). He seems very much aware of the scale of the drama, and refuses to make a crisis out of it. From the almost gauche opening and through the intimacy of the central section he keeps the temperature down, allowing the momentary surges of emotion to make their points succinctly. Only at the climax does he crank up the tension through beautifully controlled accelerandi, but even here he is aware of the personal nature of the music, which must not upstage the grander, relatively public drama of the finale.

The deep-throated bass strings at the start of the finale sort of echo the darkness of the opening, but now that stifling oppression is lifted. That this is the Dawn of Hope that the end of the first movement sought is reflected in the exotic coilings and rubati of the expressive solo oboe, flute and bassoon (almost as if the People were arising and stretching their cramped limbs!), and the ethereal harmonies evoked by the feather-bed of strings. Shostakovich builds tension in an unusual way: he knows, and he knows we know, that this movement is sooner of later bound to spring to life in a big way. So, what does he do? Offering virtually nothing by way of advance warning, he just lets this blissful, haunting music wend its easy way. "Easy" is how it should be, according to the composer’s marking. Most conductors take it adagio (some of them molto so), and follow that by molto presto or even prestissimo depending, I guess, on the maximum revs. that their orchestras can spin. But, this isn’t supposed to be a spectacular showcase for virtuosi: Shostakovich said andante - allegro, and "easy-going then jolly" is how Barshai sets out his stall. His allegro pops up cheekily, all spick and span, perky woodwind and scuttling strings whirring away. The music is allowed to bounce along, growing "naturally", the deeper surges being not so much "residual threats" from the defunct tyrant as simple undercurrents of excitement. The climax nevertheless packs a fair clout, the massive declamation of DSCH being capped by a superb swish on the tamtam. Although not strictly "correct", Barshai allows just a marginal relaxation of tempo for the hazy delirium of the central episode, which sounds as if Shostakovich, having finally bellowed his name at the top of his voice for what must have felt like the first time ever, can’t really believe that the "time for dancing in the street", which was "not yet" at the end of his Eighth, has actually arrived! The final peroration is not unrestrained. To be sure, Barshai does loosen the reins, but he doen’t whip the orchestra into a full frenzy. Maybe, like Shostakovich, he’s aware that while Stalin is gone, Stalin’s cronies are still there. If I might (mis-) appropriate the title of the finale of Hypothetically Murdered, this is very much a Dance of the Temporary Victors. Barshai and his sturdy, reliable WDRSO provide a less overtly spectacular alternative view, in many ways a more realistic view, of this towering masterpiece. It is both consistent and deeply considered, and it shows.

Symphony No. 11 "The Year 1905" op. 103 (1957)

Following Stalin’s untimely death (about twenty years too late), things did get better, though nothing so radical as a return to the heady days of the 1920s. People still had to mind their political Ps and Qs, and stepping out of line still carried severe consequences. Shostakovich turned to the string quartet, finding in this less public medium a safer means of having his say. Then on the horizon loomed 1957, the year of the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution. The State expected great things of its great artists: a major symphony was required of Shostakovich, affording him yet another opportunity to demonstrate his unshakeable faith in the Soviet. After all, since the Second Symphony (marking the tenth anniversary - the "twentieth" on page 21 of the booklet is a misprint!) his track record had fallen somewhat short of his imposed performance management objectives.

The ever-helpful Soviet authorities provided Shostakovich with the ideal incentive - in 1956 they had responded to Hungary’s bid for independence with battalions of tanks and a hail of bullets. Shostakovich responded obligingly with a symphony of epic proportions, cast in his Whit Sunday-Best Propaganda Poster mode, and dutifully casting aside those disgraceful formalist tendencies which had so marred his previous three essays in the genre. You must surely have recognised the overtones of sarcasm in my words - I said all the right things, but it was clear that I meant entirely the opposite. In essence, this was what Shostakovich was doing in his music. Considering that in all probability my sarcasm will be transparent to everyone, it just brings it home how risky Shostakovich’s subversive strategy must have been.

The Eleventh Symphony bore the title The Year 1905, pointedly not the year of the glorious victory of the Soviet, but the year in which a peaceful demonstration, by people who trusted their Csar to give them a fair hearing, was dispersed with shocking brutality. In penning this title, and going on to entitle the individual movements Palace Square, The Ninth of January, Eternal Memory, and The Tocsin, Shostakovich had already done plenty to draw the parallel between that year of "abortive revolution" and the one that had just occurred in Hungary. This is why Maxim, the composer’s son, asked him, "Father, what if they hang you for this?" I think that, had Shostakovich pressed his point any harder, say by sneaking in any quotes of Hungarian songs or even the merest whiff of a Hungarian folk-rhythm, he surely would have been hanged for it.

Over the years, the poor old Eleventh has been slated from all sides: a backward step from its much more "organic" predecessors, a brash, poster-painted piece of "cinematography", over-dependent on non-original materials (it makes use of no fewer than nine, mainly revolutionary songs), blatant agitprop, and in short unworthy of a composer of his standing. Not a proper symphony at all, don’t you know? Very similar brickbats have been brought down on the head of Malcolm Arnold, albeit for very different "reasons". Arnold’s Fourth Symphony has been called the "most banal symphony ever written", largely on account of its containing "inappropriate themes" of a particularly common and vulgar sort. My riposte is to ask, "Are you confusing music that actually is tasteless, trivial, banal, or vulgar, with music which uses materials which are tasteless, trivial, banal, or vulgar?" Arnold and Shostakovich are both symphonists of the first rank, which to my mind is borne out not by their chosen materials but by the use to which those materials are put. Interestingly, both were exceptional composers of film music, and were therefore both well aware of both the techniques of musical drama and the expressive potential of "popular" materials, whether "borrowed" or "original in the style of X". So, if Shostakovich stuffs a symphony full of themes drawn from popular culture, it’s odds on that he does so for very good reasons, and the experts would be well advised to concentrate on these rather than wittering on about "bad taste". There - that’s me bound for the Bloody Tower (the one in the bowels of Broadcasting House)! In mitigation, I would say that Shostakovich uses his revolutionary song themes to telling effect both dramatically in their non-musical associations and symphonically in the intricate way he integrates and develops them.

The thing is that, as an uncultured yob (relatively speaking), I’m very well placed to be moved - or even shaken to the core of my being - by this music, which is one reason why I do so love this symphony (the cultured will, if they read on, be similarly appalled at my attitude to the even more maligned Twelfth). Mind you, one of my assessment criteria for music is that if, as I strive to "understand" a piece of music better, the music gets even more impressive, then it is "good" music. Shostakovich’s Eleventh passes this test with flying colours, so for me it’s "great music", end of argument! A measure of my affection is that I nearly wore out my LPs of the recording made by Berglund with the Bournemouth SO, which orchestra Barshai has also conducted. Fearing that my stylus might start to slice right through the vinyl, I replaced the LPs with the CD remastering of the same recording.

They say that there are better performances on record, but none that I’ve heard convinced me of the need to change horses. The performance of the WDRSO and Barshai runs it as close as any, with only one minor reservation raising its ugly head. The recording is of more concern: the dynamic range seems as tight as a whale-bone corset. Having learnt the hard way from Berglund, and therefore anticipating possible structural damage to my ears, I had set the volume so that the freezing fog of the opening bars floated forth as the merest whisper, only to find that subsequent fortissimi hardly had the strength to dribble out of my loudspeaker cones! If I adjusted the volume to get those about right, the eerie near-silences took on seemingly stentorian proportions. Using the level meters on my MD recorder, I did some quick comparisons. The overall dynamic range is no more than 40 dB. (which is a hell of a lot less than even an LP can manage!). Relative to maximum modulation of 0 dB, the strings at the very start peaked at about -30, but the subsequent recurrences of this sound didn’t get past -35. Solo instruments, including harp (low notes) and celesta, playing above this texture frequently hit -25, leaving headroom between pretty quiet solos and con tutti ghettoblastimento of only 25 dB. This all seems to point not at some foible of the conductor, but firstly at the general level initially being set too high then pulled back as the music progresses, and secondly at the even higher initial levels on soloists’ "spot" mics. not being granted the same consideration. Needless to say, it could have been compensated at least to some degree during editing - then again maybe it was, but not by enough.

Although this is damaging to the impact of the music, it is not altogether disastrous, provided that you crank up the volume by about 6 to 10 dB at the start of the second movement! Making allowances for the spurious levels, the playing itself is vividly atmospheric. The first movement is a quarter of an hour of almost incessant, sparsely-populated "pregnant pause" - and any conductor who messes it about will inevitably come a cropper. Barshai’s control pays real dividends, not only in the measured, almost relentless pace (or lack of pace) but also in the care taken over the all-important "chording" of the string textures. On the melodic front, Barshai equally draws finely the distinctions between the prickly clawing of the anxious, animated passages and the innocence of the trusting people suggested by the sweeter outlines of the quoted songs. In and amongst, the ominous fanfare figures (that suggest the military hidden and waiting in the wings) are chillingly intoned by the WDRSO brass and horns. A couple of the cruel, and cruelly exposed, solo top notes succeed only by the skin of their teeth, but this (happily) seems to add to the icy tension. The tympanist deserves a special mention: hovering throughout the movement like some attendant Angel of Death, his (or her) repeated intonations of a figure which will become a crucial generating motive have a dull "plopping" tone that is absolutely spot on.

Although the four movements are distinct, Shostakovich designed them to run continuously. Thus, the dark stirrings at the start of the second movement steal out of the frozen embers of the end of the first. That "generator" is already busy generating, working up a polyphonic panic mingled with the "military threat" motive and the theme of a song (Oh Thou, our Tsar). Barshai builds the tension unerringly, moving from vague unease to brutalised panic as effectively as Berglund. In the ensuing unquiet, the milling themes are joined by the first intimations of Bare Your Heads (on this Sorrowful Day). The crowd’s growing awareness of the imminent threat crystallises in the increased ardour of their pleading, the greater savagery of the climax, and the even more stunned subsequent "unquiet", rendering the emaciated sound of the WDRSO woodwind, as they intone the symphony’s glacial opening motive somewhat like a Russian Orthodox chant, all the more horribly enervating. The brazen "military threat" resounds alone, and the hush is shattered by a superbly startling snare-drum rattle, dry as dust. The "generator" now generates a rough-shod fugato, hacked out venomously by the WDRSO strings. Apart from the upward trombone glissandi, which are too clipped to make their full, flesh-crawlingly slimy impact, this entire "massacre" episode is brilliantly brought off, as is (the reservations regarding the dynamics apart) the nerve-jangling aftermath. In the warmth of the flute, reprising the first movement’s Listen (". . . like the conscience of a tyrant, the autumn night is black"), there is a stark contrast with the surrounding ice and corpses.

The third movement is a comparatively "straightforward" requiem in a "simple" ABA form. Over pizzicato basses picking at the bones of the fallen, the WDRSO cellos gently and with solemn simplicity intone You Fell as Victims. This tune, which Barshai does not let sag in spite of the tempting adagio marking, is played right through before other strings begin to harmonise in condolence. For Shostakovich (or anybody else, for that matter) this is a pretty blatant quote, and what’s more it’s a tune that was used at Lenin’s funeral. The brief development of the theme is equally restrained, but not so the ensuing Welcome the Free Word of Liberty (which was foreshadowed on brass in the "massacre" episode). This is pronounced by leaden, gloomy horns over a glutinous funereal rhythm on bass winds (ten out of ten especially for the oily bass clarinet!), in entire - and I’m sure entirely deliberate - contradiction of its implied words. I do get the definite impression that Shostakovich is trying to tell us something. As the violins take up the line, Shostakovich proceeds to draw out the melody into a throbbing threnody of jaw-dropping fervour. This extended build-up is powerfully wrought by Barshai, but the impact of the volcanic climax, capped by two statements of Bare Your Heads growled awesomely by massed brass, is undermined by some slight uncertainty in the percussion. This is one place where Berglund triumphs, the Bournemouth bass-drummer putting some real whiplash into his crescendi. Nevertheless, it’s still exciting, as is the subsequent, almost inarticulate groping for the solace of You Fell as Victims. It falls, as so often, to that sorrowing WDRSO first bassoon to find the road to a brief moment of private sorrow.

The opening of the finale, ostensibly representing the stirrings of revolution in the aftermath of the massacre but ending in a huge and notably less than optimistic question mark, is discreetly marked allegro non troppo - allegro. Both Berglund and Barshai end up going at the same speed, but while Berglund sets off briskly then winds up the tempo slightly over several bars, Barshai sets a more dogged initial pace then suddenly takes off like a greyhound. That abrupt acceleration sounds disconcerting. Berglund makes more sense musically, but I have a feeling that Barshai may be the more correct, particularly in view of the identity of the opening theme (Rage, You Tyrants!) and the strong smell of the Tenth Symphony’s "Stalin" movement in the shrieking woodwind just after "take-off". This first of three sections is the only part of the entire symphony to carry any note of optimism. Rage, You Tyrants! and Bare Your Heads are interwoven with several other tunes - Boldly Friends, On We March (a revolutionary song), Warsaw March (a revolutionary song, originally Polish), and a theme from a musical comedy about peasant life in Tsarist Russia by Shostakovich’s one-time pupil Sviridov. Shostakovich’s tapestry is a complex tour de force of hectic activity. In all this mayhem, the only thing that matters is that the players give it all they’ve got, which they do, and to a large extent hang the accuracy (the occasional blooper, and there are some, only adds to the mayhem!).

It comes crashing to a halt in one of Shostakovich’s trademark massed unisons, on the theme O Thou, Our Tsar which is hurled like an angry accusation (though at which "Tsar", do you think?). This in turn is silenced by the tamtam (and what a terrific tamtam this orchestra has), leaving us confronted by the frozen image of Palace Square for one final time. "Baring his Head", the WDRSO’s cor anglais excels, voicing the composer’s secret thoughts with sorrowing tenderness. Significantly, the coda commences on the second movement’s "people’s panic" theme, a whirling woodwind miasma out of which Bare Your heads emerges. They combine into a wild build-up to one of the most astonishing conclusions in the entire symphonic repertoire, the whole orchestra balefully thundering along like some juggernaut! Berglund, after getting so much right, saves his Big Blooper for here of all places: right in the middle of this enraged pageant he lets the tempo drop - only a nadge, but a crucially damaging nadge. Not so Barshai. He lacks the sheer weight of Berglund, but his juggernaut is relentless and his WDRSO bells really clang out in brazen alarm. You can’t miss the "Angel of Death" motive, the last note of which hangs in the air for seconds after the clamour has crashed to its conclusion.

The shortcomings of this CD are few and mostly minor (although it is a real pity about that dynamic range!), whilst Barshai’s clear-sighted reading ensures that all the composer’s questions are asked. Shostakovich’s Eleventh may well be dismissed as brash, garish, agitprop clap-trap, but like "beauty" these things are only skin-deep. I think Barshai also compels us to look behind the gaudy curtain (almost certainly erected entirely on purpose by the composer), to see this work in its true colours: as a "proper" symphony - and that, to my mind at least, is exactly what it is.

Symphony No. 12 "The Year 1917" op. 112 (1961)

Back in 1997, I wrote a programme note for two performances (and cracking performances they were too, I might add) of this symphony given by the Slaithwaite PO under the baton of their redoubtable (and now alas retired) conductor Adrian Smith. The first paragraph is worth quoting here, to set the scene: "In 1960, at the frozen heart of the Cold War, Shostakovich finally became a member of the Communist Party, subsequently ‘contributing’ to Pravda a series of articles condemning bourgeois western music. At that time, the West, not comprehending the consequences of the alternative, understandably damned Shostakovich with the rest of the Soviet Union. When the Twelfth Symphony was first heard at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival, the critics were appalled at this crude piece of blatant, poster-painted Soviet propaganda. After all, that was exactly what it sounded like, lacking even the one redeeming feature of the much-maligned Second Symphony, that extraordinary, undisciplined crucible in which Shostakovich forged his mature style. [Whilst] the Second was seen as experimental, the Twelfth seemed merely excremental."

After having held out for so many years, why did Shostakovich chuck in the towel and meekly pick up his Party membership card? Was he going soft? Not a bit of it! He joined up because he was forced to (think of "the consequences of the alternative"), by a Soviet State that was dispassionately measuring the propaganda value of his burgeoning international reputation. I observe those cosseted pop and film "stars" who whinge on about the excessive media attention that they attract, when it is nothing more than "the price of fame", a price that’s clearly enough displayed on the goods they so desire, and if they think it’s too much it they can simply walk away. Perhaps the tale of Shostakovich’s "price of fame" ought to be compulsory reading?

Ah, but had he chucked in the towel? Those critics who heard the Twelfth Symphony clearly thought so, and the music certainly sounded like it - as a piece of blatant agitprop, the Twelfth left even the Eleventh gasping in its wake. In recent years, though, a different view is emerging, a view that finds in the Twelfth possibly the pinnacle of Shostakovich’s achievement as a two-faced subversive, a view that sets up Shostakovich as the epitome of the fabled "white man speak with forked tongue". If it’s true, then it’s an incredible feat, which makes this an incredible piece of music.

The one argument that it doesn’t settle is whether this is a "proper" symphony. That apart, the only question is this: is it true? Well, I can’t tell you one way or the other, but in all honesty I can say that I think it is true. Even disregarding both what preceded and what followed the Twelfth, the evidence and arguments are strong enough to cast severe doubts regarding the simple "agitprop" postulate, and that alone makes this symphony deserving of our attention. The good news in this respect is that Barshai and the WDRSO deliver an outstanding performance, with excellent recorded sound, to maximise the pleasure of our labours!

To get back to the tale: that "price", in addition to the compulsory subscription and his signing his name to those articles (it’s certain that he didn’t write them himself. I get the impression that nobody ever did - there’s nowt new about "spin doctors", is there?), he was required to produce a new symphony dedicated to the memory of Lenin. The prospect filled him with dreadful dismay. Sure, he had on previous occasions put out the word that he was working on such a project, but this time the jackboot was on the other foot, and he was faced with the daunting prospect of "forced labour". The crux of his problem was Lenin. In the officially atheistic Soviet Union, Lenin was as near to a "god" as they got. Shostakovich had to be extra careful. In the past, the risk had been that of "merely" upsetting the Party. But to be caught out criticising Lenin, whom apparently he hated almost as much as Stalin, would be tantamount to "blasphemy". He could, of course, have copped out and simply given them what they demanded, and punched home the glorification of Lenin with a choir singing a suitable text. It goes without saying that his technical skills would have been up to it, but by this time the stoic resistance which had built up over the years simply would not allow him to stoop to such a genuflectory gesture, which would have in any event ruined his international reputation. He struggled for inspiration and, it would seem, made progress only when he had committed himself to producing what was on the face of it the most agitprop work ever, whilst bending his subversive powers to the limit - and it would have to be instrumental. His hope, forlorn as it turned out, was surely that someone in the West would "get the message".

His basic method was simple: a code to represent Lenin (basically phrases with even numbers of beats), a code to represent "the People" (odd numbers of beats), and a lot of creative thought to marry symphonic form, surface impression, and "true" subtext. Even this brought problems, with toffee-nosed pundits declaring, "This symphony is almost devoid of ideas". So what? Following that kind of logic, so is Sibelius’ Seventh, to name but the most obvious! You may shoot me for being biased, but I’m going to stick my neck out anyway: I think this is a terrific piece of music, by any standards, and no, you don’t need to know the underlying politics to get the message - invent your own storyline if you wish, and so long as it’s properly consistent with the musical ideas and their abstract adventures, I am fairly convinced that your tale will be as riveting as the one Shostakovich had in mind when he wrote the work.

Surprisingly, the catalogue boasts well over a dozen recordings of this symphony - not that I’ve been worried about that: I’ve lived quite happily for years with my old Classics for Pleasure LP featuring the Philharmonia under Georges Pretre. But, because it was one I had only on LP, this disc happened to be the first onto the CD tray when I received the review set. Right at the start of the first movement (Revolutionary Petrograd), I was struck by the extraordinary quality of the WDRSO bass strings, a full bodied, dark brown sound with some unruly, growling resonances that (it seemed to me) betokened playing more concerned with musical effect than technical refinement. If these chaps had been short of rehearsal time, they’d made economies in all the right places!

This black-browed opening subject, brimming with two-note phrases, we must perforce associate with the "subject" of the symphony. This lunges from looming menace into purposeful action, crisply articulated at speed, with bags of fire and momentum. The second subject also first appears on bass strings. Gentle, flowing, and of course brimming with three-note phrases, this blossoms into an aspiring climax whereupon it is beset by two-note thuds. This is but the first example of how Shostakovich works these two elements against one another, augmented by significant quotations from the Eleventh Symphony and Lady MacBeth (the "betrayal" motive!), to underline "Lenin" as a cynical manipulator of the naive and trusting " People" (and, to cap it all, at 9'48 I’ve also just spotted a reference to the aggressive climax of the first part of the finale of the Seventh!). I was mightily impressed by the utter conviction with which Barshai drives his WDRSO forces, bringing out these interactions between the "driver" and the "driven", interactions which the unwary can easily lose behind the gaudy curtain of orchestral pyrotechnics. Sure, there is a fair bit that can be described as "mechanical movie action music", but Barshai never lets us forget that even this is part of the overall "message".

The music slips into the brooding beginning of the second movement with a seamless ease that belies the degree of judgement required for such a transition (only the CD display switching from "1" to "2" betrays it!). Shostakovich’s title, Razliv, drops a massive hint that here he is concerned with Lenin hatching his master plan. Throughout, Barshai maintains a wonderful veiled quality, strings velvety, wind solos cold and soul-less. He balances to a "T" the active bass-line, so that the "People" really do seem to creep into Lenin’s mind from "below", providing the basis for Lenin’s self-deification in the ironic "holy music" that Shostakovich floats aloft. As the solo trombone announces the Plan, shivers run through the orchestra like lances of ice. Ian MacDonald said of this movement, "Thus, with infinite finesse, Shostakovich lays at Lenin's door the ultimate guilt for the fifty million victims of his Glorious Revolution", and with equal finesse the WDRSO and Barshai would have us believe every word of that.

In basing the furtive flurryings of the start of the third movement, Aurora, on the second movement theme betokening Lenin’s inspiration, Shostakovich neatly suggests "plan" becoming "action". If Barshai seems to underplay this first part of the movement, it’s because he’s aware that there’s only one real climax. Through restraint, the tension is if anything increased: in the calm before the storm you could cut the air with a knife. Then the strings start crawling like guerrillas in the undergrowth, and the "People" rise up with a tremendous rallying-cry - a beautifully-engineered crescendo, by both composer and performers. The cynical will observe that now the bullets are flying, there’s no sign of the Glorious Leader himself! The problem for performers with this "battle music" is that there is only a hairline between too clog-footedly slow and too frenetically fast - in both cases it ends up sounding just plain silly. Barshai splits the hair with a scalpel, right down the middle, and the impact is mesmerising.

The battle music spills into victory music, though Shostakovich might well have been hanged for it, as the horns announce The Dawn of Humanity by gloriously intoning the theme of his early, abortive work Funeral March for the Victims of the Revolution. This theme had appeared fleetingly in the second movement, as a sly, caustic rejoinder to Lenin’s "inspiration", but here he replaces that former finesse with seemingly suicidal blatancy. I presume he must have known that only his nearest and dearest would actually be aware of the connotation. I presume also that Barshai is privy to the connotation, bearing in mind his friendship with its composer and judging by his handling of the theme - he encases its feet in concrete overshoes! The subsequent dizzy "dancing in the streets" (c.f. Eighth Symphony!), loosely based on the "People" is made to chitter cheerfully by the strings and woodwind, with the "Lenin" theme drifting amiably in the crowds.

It’s at the end of this development that Barshai brilliantly delivers Shostakovich’s coup de grace. Winding up the tempo, he plunges into a gaily lilting rendition of the "People", immediately recognisable as being in the style of Rimsky Korsakov, who was (of course) well known as a revolutionary sympathiser. Shostakovich thereby associates the victorious people with the Narodniks, the "proper" People’s Revolutionaries of 1905, and delivers a right old poke in the eye to Lenin and his Bolsheviks. "Lenin" is naturally furious, becoming a militaristic bulldozer before rising in his true colours, as per the very beginning of the symphony. Barshai caps his superb interpretation with a massive, grinding coda. Taking a deliberate tempo, and ramming it home with power and passion, just as he did at the ends of the Fifth and Seventh he negates the sense of triumph: while "Lenin" is not heard, his presence is felt - the "People" and the "Funeral March" themes in pointed juxtaposition under a dead weight, as the long suffering ordinary folk of Russia jump out of the frying pan ...

As you may have guessed, I’m with MacDonald on this one: Shostakovich’s Twelfth is, under its propagandist clown’s mask a damned fine symphony that doesn’t deserve to be as damned as it has been. Rudolf Barshai’s reading may not be the most physically exciting, but he does do the music justice, gets some very fine playing from the WDRSO, and is well-recorded in a very convincing, beautifully balanced sound field.

Symphony No. 13 "Babi Yar" op. 113 (1962)

The Twelfth seemed to find favour with (that is, "fool") the Soviet authorities, because they proceeded to take advantage of Shostakovich’s reputation abroad. Shostakovich however must have been all too aware of the derision with which the symphony was met in the West. He must have been in a turmoil, for apparently nothing of his "secret message" had got through (to be fair, the West had no inkling of what was really going on at the time behind that Iron Curtain), and the work had thus if anything damaged the international reputation that he needed as "insurance". He had to do something quickly to repair the damage, bringing him onto yet another knife-edge. Now, in addition to satisfying his own artistic imperatives, he had to "appease" two different masters: both the tyrannical regime at home and (if anything the greater challenge) the fickle cultural establishment of the West. He had to find something that would have international appeal.

The one silver lining amongst all these clouds was the Fourth Symphony, which had finally been resurrected in 1961. At the second time of asking, and under an admittedly less deadly regime than Uncle Joe’s, it had gone straight to No. 1, so to speak (what’s the Russian for "I told you so"?). More importantly, it had also been well received abroad. Nevertheless, this silver lining had its cloud, because the West pointed to the Fourth, then to the Twelfth, and observed (probably not unreasonably, given the extent of its understanding of the circumstances), "Of course, that was twenty five years ago, but this shows Shostakovich has gone right down the pan since then".

Shostakovich turned to the young poet Evgeni Yevtushenko, whose fairly critical works had (odd though it might seem) been allowed by the relatively liberal regime to penetrate to the outside, where they had met with considerable acclaim. Shostakovich, with impeccable logic, concluded that he could boldly go where Yevtushenko had gone before. In deciding to set Yevtushenko’s words, he moved on several fronts at once. Firstly, he was moving from the shady world of subversive coded messages into the bright light of explicit texts. Secondly, these were not the propagandist texts he had previously set in the Second and Third Symphonies, but something much more personal. Thirdly, he was free to cherry-pick the poems with which he found particular empathy. Fourthly, being deeply expressive of real personal feelings and moreover critical of those things Shostakovich himself despised, the poetry was anyway right up his street. Fifthly (and finally!), the import and atmosphere of the words fitted right in with the direction he wanted to take in his music.

In view of his enforced change of direction following the Fourth, I don’t think I’d be far wide of the mark to suggest that the relationship of the Thirteenth Symphony to the Fourth feels like that of the mature child to the delinquent father! Both are vast, dark-shrouded musical worlds encompassing extremes of comic and cataclysmic, reaching out and connecting across the span of the intervening symphonies. In the Thirteenth, it is as if the Fifth to the Twelfth had been squeezed like oranges, their dessicated rinds binned, and only their essential juices distilled and sprinkled onto the bones of the Fourth. Then, with eye of toad and wing of bat and diabolical incantations courtesy of Yevtushenko, Shostakovich worked his unique magic to produce music ranging from stark to sarky, and from monumental to intimate. For the first time since the Fourth, he was speaking without let or hindrance, and seized the long-awaited opportunity to express what amounted to a "credo", slamming a royal flush of hearts onto the table for all to see and wonder at.

The work gets its title, and to a large degree its overall tenor, from the poem Shostakovich sets in the first movement. Yevtushenko’s Babi-Yar is a "protest song" of blood-curdling intensity, condemning the Nazi mass-murder of a sizeable proportion of Kiev’s Jewish population, railing mightily against anti-semitism and, pointedly, against the nasty anti-semitic underbelly of the Soviet, which mirrors the tyrannical regime itself - all, I’m sure, very embarrassing to the Soviet leadership. Small wonder, then, that as soon as the work had seen the light of day, that noble leadership tried to suppress it, even though it should have perhaps been obvious even to them that such things were getting less easy to do.

If you listen to Haitink’s magisterial recording with the Concertgebouw, the recording that I myself have, you can’t fail to be impressed by the colossal, leaden weight of Shostakovich’s musical vision. Yet Barshai, with his "provincial" forces, finds something that Haitink misses in the cosy surroundings of the Grote Zal - something that I can best describe as Shostakovich’s equivalent to that "Russian primitivism" that Stravinsky immortalised in Le Sacre du Printemps. Maybe this is no more than an accidental by-product of the WDRSO playing, more rough-hewn and bristling with appropriately nasty splinters than the likes of the Concertgebouw. It doesn’t matter - what matters is that it sounds just right. That much is apparent right from the bell - literally so, for the first sound we hear is a "funeral" bell, whose tolling stalks through the whole symphony. The WDRSO make this sound no louder than the Concertgebouw, but instead of a rounded, sonically integrated "bong" we get a real, spine-chilling "clang". The woodwind and brass of the orchestral exposition, underlaid by the bleak buzz of the bass clarinet, possess an acrid stench that you can almost smell. The strings, entering with the men’s choir to the words "There is no memorial above Babi Yar", are dismally grey and shrouded (in passing, I might mention that a memorial was finally erected, in 1974). This sets the tone of the entire movement, of almost unimaginable bleakness that persists right through until the final stanza, where Yevtushenko delivers a passionate promise that Shostakovich reinforces through an emergent nobility forcing its way up through, but not quite freeing itself of, the glutinous mire of tragedy. This bleakness is projected with awesome power by Barshai: the quieter music bristles with tension, and the heaving climaxes at the heart and the end have colossal impact (try after the words "No! It’s the ice breaking!"). Incidentally, I must especially commend the WDRSO tamtam for its incredible expressive range! Barshai and the WDRSO also score in the contrasting faster passage, pungent with acid woodwind, brutal percussion and burping brass - music of the most vicious humour.

But it’s not just down to the instrumental textures; there’s the small matter of the vocal forces to consider. Where Haitink has the "Gentlemen from the Choir of the Concertgebouw Orchestra" (and that’s exactly what it says on the CD!), Barshai simply has the "Choral Academy Moscow", and these are no "gentle" men. The Russian male singing voice is one of Nature’s miracles - this lot sound as though their voices are rising from the very bowels of the Earth, and and by ‘eck it really does sound like there’s a lot of them! That’s not a trivial comment; far too often these days we hear pitifully small choral forces struggling manfully (and womanfully) to sound BIG. Maybe the companies will get away with it when the engineers have the technology, but right now if you tweak your mics. and mixers to favour a small choir doing a large choir’s job, it ends up sounding exactly as if you’d tweaked (etc.), and it simply sounds cheapskate. You only have to listen to Berlioz to know the difference between a real large choir and a pretend one! So, three cheers - no such problems here, the Choral Academy Moscow project a satisfying weight and uniformity of tone, without the slightest hint of the "accidental soloist syndrome".

Standing at the front is the real soloist, Sergei Aleksashkin, another pukka Russian whose voice I think would have reduced Mussorgsky to tears of joy! With effortless authority he covers the entire spectrum demanded by Shostakovich (who clearly was writing with a Russian, as opposed to Western, bass in mind), taking in the whole gamut from pitch-black declamation through to tremulous near-whispering ("I feel that I am Anne Frank, as tender as a shoot in April"). Not only does he know just how to use his voice, acting the part without undue exaggeration, but also (joy of all joys) there’s precious little evidence of any wobble!

At first glance, Shostakovich’s choice of a poem entitled "Humour" as the text of his second movement might seem like simply an attempt, and a hugely successful one, at Mahlerian mega-contrast. However, as the opening lines - ". . . rulers of all the world have commanded parades, but couldn’t command humour" - immediately betray, these far from still waters run much deeper than that. As I suggested earlier, Shostakovich’s wicked sense of humour must have helped him hold on to his sanity through the bitter years. I would now suggest that his choice of this poem, celebrating the victory of Humour over Tyranny, proves the point! Yevtushenko’s "Humour" comes straight from the belly, bursting with red-cheeked "ho, ho, ho!" Shostakovich marks it allegretto, and scores it with plenty of well-fed oomph, suggesting the sort of grandiloquent guffawing that would belch happily from a slightly inebriate, cossack-booted Santa Claus. Aleksashkin takes the point, with relish (dare I say?), and the chorus steer dangerously, deliciously close to the rugby club or students’ union of a Saturday night. The orchestra revel in their many "solo" bits, starting with a portentous opening that seems to mock the corresponding moment of the Tenth, then veering cheerfully from tipsy to rumbustious (and back again). At the centre of all the mayhem is Barshai, paradoxically ensuring that everything is in its proper place, everything is heard to its proper effect, including the enigmatic quote from the second movement of the Eighth Quartet that launches the brief coda ("Three cheers for Humour!"). As the movement crunches to its conclusion, on a music-hall cadence, I’m left thinking, "That’s the wackiest ‘victory hymn’ I’ve ever heard!"

The third and fourth movements together can be regarded as a "slow movement". Entitled "In the Store", the third is an utterly heart-rending combination of words and music concerned with the self-effacing stoicism of the ordinary Russian housewife. From the simple scene of women quietly queuing in the shop, the poet draws a touching image: "I’m shivering as I queue . . . but . . . from the breath of so many women a warmth spreads round the store". In describing what they endure, how they endure it, and for whom, Yevtushenko seems to sanctify them, justifying his feeling of outrage in the words, ". . . They have been granted such strength! It is shameful to short-change them! It is sinful to short-weight them!"

Shostakovich sets this poem with overwhelming empathy, the basic continual creeping motion of his music echoing the slow shuffling of the queue, the occasional "tock-tocking" of a castanet seeming to underline the almost mechanical progress of the queue. Starting with the darkest string-sounds (those fabulous WDRSO basses!), soon joined by violas caressing the line with the utmost poignancy, he gradually, almost imperceptibly lightens the texture until sanctification is achieved in violins and harp. Barshai controls it all exquisitely, coaxing from the orchestra playing of infinite tenderness. My hackles rose as Aleksashkin solemnly intoned "They have endured everything": about here comes a weird thrilling of slurring strings which is done to spine-tingling perfection. The outraged climax, by contrast, is colossal in its impact, ending on hard, stamped-out chords (not the only pointer in this symphony to the forthcoming Execution of Stepan Razin). Aleksashkin and the chorus are equally as impressive when it comes to expressing tenderness and remorse for the living as they were when venting their spleen over the murdered masses.

While the third movement relates to continuing hardship, the fourth is sort of complementary, dealing as it does with "Fears are dying out in Russia". Nevertheless, the poem’s vivid recollection of those Fears "that slithered everywhere" - of speaking, of remaining silent, of being alone, of mixing with others - must have struck white-hot sparks inside Shostakovich’s head. It’s no wonder, when Yevtushenko seemed to be "getting away" with such incandescent candour, that Shostakovich felt free to join him on the bandwagon: this was what he had been fighting against for most of his life. Yet the poem is in two parts: after a rallying-call proclaiming victory over these Fears, the poet goes on to list new Fears, fears that are "good" to have, like fear of being disloyal, or of humiliating others, or "of not writing with all my strength".

Shostakovich was quite literally inspired. His music for the first part dripped and drooled, reeking of evil. The suffocating sump-oil of bass drum and tamtam coupled with murky strings and a grisly solo tuba, realised with blood-curdling realism by the WDRSO, in an earlier time and place would have evoked the bloated figure of a somnolent, self-satisfied, and imminently doomed dragon - and, come to think of it, that image is still fairly germane! Aleksashkin, for that matter, delivers his remembrances of "Fears" like some latter-day Wotan. He could have burdened his declamatory lines with all kinds of vocal expression, but instead made them the more chilling through reserve (though I’d stop short of saying "dead pan delivery") and leaving the orchestra to provide the colouring in. I’ve noted appreciations of "doleful horns", "glowering basses", and especially the graduated approach of fanfares in trumpets, flutes, trombones, bassoons and bass clarinet - but particularly impressive are the appearance of whirring strings (as per the Sixth Symphony) plus tympani and that bell in response to "the secret fear of a knock at the door", and the col legno rhythm that subsequently ushers in the "victory march", a really nifty bit of footwork from the chorus. At the end of this section, the violas pointedly recall the ostinato from the third movement of the Eighth. In the closing section concerning the "new Fears", Aleksashkin allows just the right degree of agitation to creep in, corresponding to the appearance of glittering glockenspiel and woodwind. Tremendous stuff.

In setting Yevtushenko’s "A Career" for his finale, Shostakovich finishes the job in something of a confessional manner. The gist of the poem is that throughout history men like Galileo have been pilloried for their beliefs or discoveries, yet it is these who become "great men" while the mud-slingers end up forgotten, buried in the mucky silt of the past. The nub of the argument is that it is the suffering strivers who are the real careerists. Sung with real warmth by the soloist, Yevtushenko’s closing words - "I believe in their sacred belief, and their belief gives me courage. I’ll follow my career in such a way that I’m not following it!" - could have been written specifically for Shostakovich. In setting these words here, at the very end of this "Outspoken Oratorio", he as good as tells the world exactly what he’s been up to all these years.

But does he say so in music quivering with outrageous indignation? Not on your Nelly! The music attains such a lustre of sheer relief that I can’t help but think that this finale could well be the Eighth’s abortive "dancing in the streets" come to fruition. Perhaps, although the music and the jaunty, "twinkle in their eyes" way that Aleksashkin and the chorus perform it suggest a slightly different scenario: a cosy late-night gathering in some hospitable hostelry, at which a merry raconteur is holding court. A dizzy, lazy woodwind waltz sets the scene, then a bibulous bassoon launches a jolly recounting of Galileo’s case. The sociable singers are aptly supported by the musicians, chuntering and chortling cheerfully around, with the trumpets providing some admirably acrid "motor-horn" squawks at the words "[He] was no more stupid than Galileo". We even get "Now that’s what I understand by a ‘careerist’" as a pub-style punchline, punched home pub-style by the assembled company.

The opening waltz, delightfully pecked by pizzicato strings, returns whilst the comrades ponder the inner meaning of the tale. Glasses recharged, the assembly roars approval of such "careers" then, bolstered by some looming trombone glissandi, turns to railing at the mud-slingers. The matter is settled (in the time-honoured tradition of such discussions!) with a robust and decisive fugue, ruggedly dispatched by the orchestra. The waltz, on intimately whispering solo strings, now becomes a blissful, vaguely alcoholic haze. The bassoon theme is taken by the celeste, an angel that nevertheless dithers and gropes without success for a resolution (there’s always one who doesn’t get it!). Help is at hand, and from an unexpected quarter: that bell, which doesn’t seem to have budged a semitone right through the symphony, just happens to be sitting on the necessary note! Thus, it seems to me, in this first wholly untroubled conclusion to a Shostakovich symphony, are all the threads of the past drawn together and tied off in the present, leaving us all feeling rather more optimistic about the future.

It strikes me that Barshai is fully the equal of Haitink when it comes to management of the long-term architecture of this long work, but surpasses Haitink and is fully the equal of the likes of Mravinsky when it comes to juggling the hot coals at the heart of the music. The playing of the WDRSO is astonishingly idiomatic, like a real Russian orchestra without the wibbly-wobbly brass tone, and can rear up from confidentiality to cataclysm with nerve-shattering impact. It’s a credit to the engineers that they seem to have captured this with a full, detailed and, most significantly, wide-ranging recording - which makes it all the more a pity that they couldn’t do the same for the Eleventh! My one cavil is that there seems to be a bit of a phase mismatch between the microphones covering the choral battalions, though only hardened headphone freaks like me are likely to notice the slight "corkscrewing" effect this produces. But the the singing of Aleksashkin and the legions of lads from Moscow, who can (though hardly surprisingly!) wrap their gobs round the funny phonemes of the Russian tongue with effortless ease, is unreservedly superb, and in spite of my marginal cavils I can only conclude that this is a seriously desirable CD.

Symphony No. 14 op. 135 (1969)

The last two symphonies are the ones with which I’m least familiar, and the Fourteenth, sad to relate, wins the less than prestigious Sore Thumb Award in this respect. Happily, doing this review has provided me with a belated opportunity to put that somewhere in the region of right.

It’s well enough known that Shostakovich had developed a close association with Benjamin Britten in the years following their first meeting. Quite how they wangled it I’m not sure, as even with his greater freedom (both of expression and for travel abroad) Shostakovich was far from off the leash. Another English composer who enjoyed a cordial, if less obviously productive, relationship with Shostakovich during this period was Malcolm Arnold, who relates how they were never allowed to meet in private - in Arnold’s case, the Party-patsy Kabalevsky was the omnipresent gooseberry. Lots of Shostakovich rubbed off onto Britten, but rather less Britten rubbed off onto Shostakovich. My immediate impression of the Fourteenth Symphony is that it is not so much influenced by Britten as a deliberate adoption of elements of Britten’s style, and thus part and parcel of the tribute to a friend implicit (or even explicit, for that matter) in the work’s dedication. "Immediate" is the word! I don’t think anybody’s going to miss, in the very opening violin line, the allusion to Peter Grimes - it breathes the very same bleak, chill air that drifts in from the grey North Sea in the first Interlude.

Much the same holds in relation to the "influence" of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, which Shostakovich had orchestrated not long before writing the symphony. Then again, there is a supposed parallel with another "symphony of songs", Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. With all due respect to David Doughty, whose notes are otherwise exemplary, his suggestion that "it is indeed the close relationship of the texts which give a symphonic structure of a kind to what is otherwise a song cycle in the manner of [the Mahler]" strikes me as an uncharacteristic splodge of bovine excrement. I’m not suggesting here that Shostakovich’s work is anything but symphonic - that much is plain enough from Shostakovich’s motivic writing and the reprise of the opening bars, higher, thinner and bleaker, in the penultimate song - but by golly I disagree most strongly with the implication that Mahler’s work is not symphonic - the whole point about Mahler’s crowning masterpiece is that he finally achieved what has to be the ultimate goal of a composer of only songs and symphonies, namely the reconciliation through fusion of those two, diametrically opposed forms.

Where Shostakovich’s and Mahler’s paths coincide is that they were both suffering from undeniable intimations of mortality. Shostakovich, who had never enjoyed the rudest of health, was (if you take my meaning) becoming alarmingly polite, which conspired with his recent preoccupation to put the fear of death into him. The good thing about this is that, a number of years down the line from the cathartic Thirteenth, Shostakovich felt sufficiently free to express in his music such "negative" sentiments without worrying unduly about getting a rollocking for "formalist tendencies" or some such. The downside, if it can be called such, is that for once Shostakovich was writing a symphony devoid of any subversive undertones, coded messages and the like. If you’ve got used to treating Shostakovich symphonies as the musical equivalent of the Times crossword, the Fourteenth might seem a bit "penny plain" - only "might", mind!

Doughty, along with plenty of others (including myself!), suggests that this is "perhaps the grimmest of all his works". Fair enough, but let’s not forget that the subject of death is one of endless fascination for practically anyone suckered with the label "mortal", and right down through the ages the practitioners of all the Arts have turned this fascination into some of the greatest, and often ultimately most uplifting, works. While we’re at it, let’s not forget either that not one of the poems Shostakovich chose was about "death" plain and simple: he was less concerned about those who "fell", and more about those who were "shoved". There was clearly life in the old dog yet.

Rudolf Barshai was entrusted with the first performance. I’ve observed that plenty of folk tend to speak in tones of hushed reverence about recordings made by persons so-privileged. Why? The bloke who first performed a work isn’t necessarily the best man for the job, even if he happened to be that at the time. Composers select "premiere performers" for all sorts of reasons - and being the best-qualified for the task is rarely the top of the list. In Barshai’s case, though, it is true that friendship and mutual respect had a lot to do with it. But we still shouldn’t let that colour our judgement, should we?

Shostakovich chose eleven poems, in movement order two by the Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca, six by Guillaume Appolinaire, one by Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, and two by Maria Rainer Rilke. That’s a total of precisely none written in Shostakovich’s mother-tongue, so all of them were originally set in translation. Doughty points out that Shostakovich later sanctioned performances using the original languages, as well as a version in German translation - though surprisingly not one in English, the language of the symphony’s dedicatee, Britten! Clearly, the inflections and speech rhythms of the texts, the music inherent in the sounds of the poetry, were not very high on Shostakovich’s list of priorities, and we the listeners must seek the correspondence between text and music from the "flow of meaning", assuming of course that any particular translation from the Russian translations with which Shostakovich worked has been done so as to preserve the order as set. Ye gods, that’s convoluted! Thankfully, this recording sticks to the "original" Russian, which is probably the form in which the composer himself first apprehended the poems!

A symphony this may be by name, but a song cycle it most definitely is by nature: each of the songs is sharply characterised and distinguished from its neighbours, even where Shostakovich engineers a seamless link from one to the next. The poems are frequently like "playlets" so, compared with the relatively detached, discursive approach of the Thirteenth, here the singers have to act their socks off! It follows, as day does night, that suitable singers are going to make a performance, whilst duffers will destroy it. With Alla Simoni and Vladimir Vaneev, Barshai seems to have come up trumps.

Like Aleksashkin, Vaneev is a real Russian bass, another of those voices that’s ample, black as a coal cellar at midnight, and ideally suited to the sort of grave (!) recitative that Shostakovich requires in the first song (appositely entitled De Profundis), or the venomous expressions of disgust in the eighth (The Zaporozhian Cossack’s Answer to the Sultan of Constantinople), where he revels in the colouful language. This is definitely one to keep away from the kiddies, unless you want to explain the meaning of sentences like "You were born while your mother was writhing in faecal spasms"! Even when he’s singing high up, the shadow of those deep undertones still resonates within the sound, as in the third song (Lorelei) where he also demonstrates articulative agility comparable to the soprano’s, or in the ninth (O Delvig!) where he veers from tenderness to tentative optimism to heartrending effect.

I generally quake with apprehension when sopranos, whose voices seem to be trained to crack glasses at twenty paces, point their lethal vocal chords in my direction. With blessed relief I can tell you that Simoni is a god-send. She has a strong voice, but (to my ears) a delivery that is firm and relatively uniform across her entire range: there is little if anything of the dreaded wobble or yowling "up top", and (best of all) she wilfully ignores the "Soprano Axiom" ("Output level shall be proportional to frequency squared, or cubed if you can manage it"). But there’s more than mere firmness and strength of tone - for example in the fourth movement (The Suicide), there’s touching delicacy as well. To cap it all she is an incredible vocal actress - particularly evident in the sixth song (Madam, look!) where her hysterical hacking of the word "laughing" becomes a comical cross between stammering and gipping! - if anything more than a match for even the impressive Vaneev.

So, the voices are terrific, but what of their "backing group"? I have memories (however distant and vague!) of playing cleaner than this. I equally have memories (equally distant, but rather more distinct!) of it utterly boring the pants off me. I’d like to think that it’s because I’m older, wiser, and more perceptive. I’d like to, but with a sigh I must set vanity aside and instead admit that it’s because the WDRSO strings play with a fire and pungency that simply pins me to the wall, and with such sweetness that I melt and dribble down onto the floor. I could rabbit on for ages (come to think of it, I have anyway!) about all the zillions of felicities that litter the course of this symphony, but I’ll have to limit myself to an exemplificatory "Oh, god! You should hear those double-basses!" Shostakovich, in coincidental observation of UK trades descriptions legislation, says "strings and percussion", making sparing but correspondingly effective use of the can-banging boys. If the most significant contribution comes in the form of the temporal ticking of clacking castanets, they do get one "big scene", when they’re let off the leash in the militaristic fifth song (On Watch). By gum, do they enjoy the outing!

Standing at the centre of it all is Rudolf Barshai, guiding the threads of the music with effortless-sounding fluidity - nothing fast seems reckless or rushed, yet even the snailest of snail’s paces is palpably mobile. The voices are placed well to the fore, but Barshai makes pretty sure that not a single note of the instrumental contribution is lost. The many facets of Death drawn together by the composer’s collection of texts are characteristically by no means all unremitting gloom; we get doses of rage and outrage, stoic acceptance and aching nostalgia, even comic turns and a ray or two of hope. That’s a lot of ground, and Barshai covers it all. The recording, both immediate and ambient, is absolutely superb.

I don’t want to end this on a negative note, so I’ll say this first: why on earth are there no texts and translations? Shostakovich was responding in a profound manner to the poetry - to hear the "flow of music" without knowing the corresponding "flow of meaning" is like going to the cinema and sitting with your eyes shut, i.e. utterly ridiculous. Anyway, quite honestly, I don’t care if this music can be played - or sung, for that matter - better than it is here. These musicians have inflamed my mind and touched my heart, and believe me that’s not as easy to do now as it once was!

Symphony No. 15 op. 141 (1971)

Having got the subject of death off his chest, Shostakovich moved on. Or did he? Our impressions of the Fifteenth Symphony are inevitably coloured by its opening "toyshop" movement. In music as in anything else first impressions are sticky little blighters, so much so that we as often as not end up wasting half our lives trying to make everything that follows fit in. Hence the commonly-expressed feeling that the work is enigmatic, mysterious, puzzling. I remember one chap who beat his brains against the brick bastions of the Fifteenth for ages, then concluded (not unreasonably, if a little harshly, given his frustration) that the whole shebang was the rag-bag product of a composer on the threshold of senile dementia. Me? I don’t believe that for one second.

So what is going on? That first movement looms less large when viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, as I found when I tried taking a step back and looking at the piece as a whole. I got the distinct impression that, whereas the Fourteenth’s statement about death was coloured by a degree of political motivation, the Fifteenth is instead about death, "plain and simple". Let’s face it: if at any age you’re racked by increasing ill-health, intrusive thoughts of kicking the bucket are hard to put down. Up to around twenty years previously, Shostakovich had been fearful that the nocturnal "knock at the door" would be that of Uncle Joe’s bully-boys coming to take him away. In his mid-sixties and racked by increasing ill-health, the knock was more likely to be that of the "real-life" Grim Reaper.

In this light, the Fifteenth Symphony sounds to be a not unreasonable combination of reminiscence and valediction, starting in the frolicsome foibles of carefree youth and ending up shrouded in the mists of the Ultimate Question. This would explain the flurry of self-quotations, but not the two "sore thumbs" - Wagner and Rossini. Many diverse composers have been influenced by Wagner, but I’d wager that there’re precious few of us who’d bet so much as a ha’penny on Shostakovich being one of them. Maybe he’s leg-pulling: "Here it is, folks, my Grand Wagnerian Influence!" On the other hand, in quoting the Fate motive, that dread harbinger and herald of the fall of Siegfried, the irrepressible and fearless hero, he is (as ever) neatly pinning a dark relevance onto his gag. Of course, he also quotes that well-known motive from Tristan und Isolde, the infamous rising dissonance which resolves only onto further dissonance, yearning after an unattainable ideal - and neatly turns it into an inconsequential ditty. This could so easily be a veiled comment on the triviality of Man’s most solemn aspirations when faced with the unknowable mysteries.

But what should we make of the quotation of Rossini’s famous William Tell galop? Suspecting, as per the Fate motive, some devious connection with the music’s operatic context, I asked someone who knows about these things. I was told that, after the sizzling conclusion of the overture, that particular tune does not feature in the drama at all: it occurs, with considerably less vehemence, only in the bucolic burblings of the ballet music! Momentarily dismayed, I retreated and regrouped "with the speed of light, and a cloud of dust, and a hearty ‘Hi-yo, Silver!’" I wondered (somewhat feverishly), did Shostakovich watch TV on those visits to the West that started in the late Fifties? If so, did he (like so many of my generation) become a fan of the Lone Ranger? Did he see in Tonto’s Kemo Sabay a reflection of himself, galloping on his white stallion, protecting the innocent, and waging a one-man war against the nasty baddies? Ridiculous thought, isn’t it? Well, the opera buff remarked, and as far as I can tell in all innocence, "Maybe he was a fan of the Lone Ranger". That makes two of us being ridiculous, so perhaps we should all listen to the music in that context, and then see how ridiculous it really is?

Barshai and his faithful Indian companions set off at a thoroughly jolly trot, opposing a sunny flute to the icy pricklings of glockenspiel, and setting a thoroughly amiable tone for the entire first movement. The tune is remarkably reminiscent of the DSCH-based main subject of the first movement of the First Cello Concerto, a theme which had already resurfaced in the Eighth Quartet. Here it is utterly, uncomplicatedly merry: freed of its former political undertones, it expands under Barshai’s fatherly guidance into Shostakovich’s putative "toyshop". The whole movement is delightfully done, every corner of the WDRSO, including the considerable "kitchen", enjoying the youthful romp - I warmed especially to the trumpet, whose poco inebrioso quasi Prokofiev sounds like little Johnny has sampled something from the sideboard that Daddy should have kept in a safer hidey-hole! There’s also some gorgeously rumbustious playing, notably from those lower strings, but nothing is allowed to threaten the childlike mood: even the main climax, in its outline, weight and tone harks back not to anger or anguish past, but to the youthful impetuosity of the Second Piano Concerto. Tellingly, just before this jubilation comes another significant reminiscence of Shostakovich’s own youth, as he reproduces in the strings the effect of that extraordinary, layered "miasma" of the experimental Second Symphony. Then, almost at the end, hot on the heels of a circus band march-past he does it again, only this time chattering on the lighter woodwind and percussion, for all the world like kids playing with grown-up toys.

Whereas the first movement looked back at the Good Old Days (the accent being firmly on the "Good"), the second looks forward less than optimistically to what the future holds. The WDRSO’s brass lean wearily on the straining dissonances of their chorale, the solo cello struggles up from the depths of its rocking-chair only to lament, the solo trombone is all but drained of energy and expression. The solo violin aspires momentarily, but is cut off by toneless (or intoneless!) dead-sounding woodwind chords, reminiscent of the chords in the coda of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra or (and here’s a thought!) those famous "self-cancelling" chords of Stravinsky’s. When I say it sounds dreadful, that’s not a complaint but a compliment! Curiously, when the trombone does stir itself into something approaching a tune, to the accompaniment of a suitably leaden tuba, it emerges as something of a dirge-variant of Waltzin’ Matilda (this surely is accidental?!). The violin again sings with affecting sweetness, but is again confounded by those negating woodwind (one of the curiosities about growing older is that our minds, remaining forever "sweet sixteen", can’t understand why the body creaks and groans at even the most trivial demands). It’s too much; warping the once proud and defiant DSCH into an agonised, plunging SDCH, the dirge spills over into massive mortification that is hammered home to horribly enervating effect. Only exhaustion can follow: strangulated muted trumpets, halting string phrases like glimmering red embers, lifeless plunkings of celeste, a dull and broken tattoo of tympani. Sure, I’ve heard this movement played with more outright intensity than this, but for me Barshai scores in avoiding that extreme. He seems to be very much aware that this is "terminal" music, even in the embittered climax which in his hands becomes like the abortive flare of a dying sun, shedding the remnants of its light into an uncaring universe.

The ensuing short allegretto sounds a bit brighter, with its almost pointillist chamber-music scoring delectably dotted by the players. The tune skips upwards, then turns on its head and skips downwards, getting nowhere fast. In keeping the pace leisurely, the tempo metronomic, and the dynamics subdued, Barshai finds an eerie, haunted quality, carrying something of the feeling of "Death takes the Fiddle", helped out more than a little by some splendidly scrawny playing (quite deliberate, I’m sure!). My gut feelings are that this symphony is stuffed to the gunnels with self-quotations, and my intestines are just as sure that as yet I haven’t spotted 99% of them. Nevertheless I’d lay odds that the grotesque downward trombone slides, leerily relished by the WDRSO first trombone, are a reference to the comical detumescence of the sated Sergei in Scene 3 of Lady MacBeth. If so, then here they ram home the prevailing impression of failing potency, as do the dislocated clatterings of the percussion - the WDRSO can-bangers, captured in great detail by the recording, create a convincing "clock with a dicky ticker".

The opening of the finale confirms the progression. Shostakovich, in co-opting the gloomy brass Fate motive and attendant halting drum rhythm from Siegrfried’s Tod, foretells the fall of another hero - the composer himself. It also forms a wonderful complement and opposition to the Rossini quote from the first movement, or it does if you subscribe to the "Lone Ranger Theory", because then that quotation also relates to a "hero", only one who is full of vim, vigour, and fighting spirit, and for whom death was merely something he himself visited on the enemies of justice. But then Shostakovich, teasingly tweaking the Tristan quote, immediately goes on to demonstrate that his own sense of humour, like the Humour of the Thirteenth Symphony, is unquenchable. Barshai here coaxes, with faultless timing, a prettily poised tenuto from the violins. At a measured, dead-even tempo, Barshai makes the ensuing ghostly dance feel like the comical passage of the Fourth’s finale with all its get-up-and-go got up and gone: all is understated and wan, what little colour it has in its cheeks draining away in the twilight. The music subsides, via what must surely be a glance back to the nocturnal pacings of the Tenth, to the gloomy stasis of Siegfried’s Tod, into which the WDRSO’s wonderful first clarinet meanders listlessly. Gradually, the music stirs and grows, in a long, curiously crawling crescendo. The climax that erupts, triggered with telling rubato, mirrors the outburst in the second movement, and is likewise burdened. The tune of the plodding dirge this time sounds like a variant of the first few bars of the Seventh’s "Nazi" march, as if the strutting jackboot had become a lead-lined size 15 welly. This climax ends in real disaster: a cinematographic "shock, horror!" discord like the Last Gasp of the Damned. The Wagner quotes and the ghostly dancing, already more remote, are gradually stifled by the "self-negating" chords of the second movement: is this Shostakovich’s impression of Asrael tapping Dmitri Dmitrevich on the shoulder? The coda drifts into delirium. Over a numb hum of strings, the wraiths of themes half-remembered jostle with the percussion "dicky-ticker", and then - nothing.

Again, I am led to wonder whether, in such music, those who bring more overtly expressive playing aren’t in some way missing the point. I must confess that, had I come to this performance of this symphony "cold", then in respect of all save the first movement I would in all likelihood have carped about listless phrasing and dull, ponderous climaxes (and so forth). But I haven’t come to it "cold", I’ve come to it via the other fourteen performances in the cycle, and along the way I’ve picked up a great deal of respect and admiration for Barshai’s thoughtful interpretations. Consequently, I do not believe (as some do) that he has "blobbed out" at the finishing post. What we hear is exactly what he intended us to hear. My feelings about the nature of the music, as expressed here, do not originate from any perceptive acuity on my part (though it would be a nice ego-boost if they did!), but from what Barshai is telling me. It doesn’t really matter whether you think his performance good or bad, because above all it is an informed one.

Round-Up and Conclusions

The recording schedule of this cycle, a dozen "sittings" over a period of eight years, is astonishingly convoluted - just bend your brains around this little lot! Ten of the symphonies were set down in one "sitting" (series of sessions during a given month) each, but in the order 7, 1, 3, 2, 12, 6, 10, 15, 11, 13. The rest were done in pairs of sittings anything up to nineteen months apart, except for number 9 which surprisingly took three sittings over a nine-month period. On top of that, at least five of the sittings involved two or more different symphonies - during September 1995 they worked on numbers 5, 9, and 12, and April 1996 saw effort devoted to numbers 4, 5, 9 (the CD cases give days as well as months, but even my pernickety mind baulks at descending to that level of detail!). The logistics must have been a nightmare, but this must also mean that both players and conductor must have been thoroughly immersed, if not in the cycle as a whole, then at least in considerable breadths of it at a time. How else can we explain such noteworthy consistency over such a long period?

Regarding the recorded sound, although three producers were variously involved, all the recordings were made by the same engineer, Siegfried Spittler, who on the whole has captured the sounds fabulously, in terms of both quality and consistency. My only real reservations concerned the balance and dynamics of the Eleventh, but even this is by no means a dead loss. Moreover, all the recordings were made in the same location, Cologne’s warm-hearted Philharmonie, which makes the relatively "sore thumb" of this symphony, to say the least, a mite puzzling. Spittler has, with commendable good sense, tempered the warm acoustic by pushing his microphones forward just enough to "prick" the ambience with detail, but not so far as to detach a wholly "foreground" orchestra from a wholly "background" ambience. I have noted a couple of places where the microphones seemed to overload. These were always where Shostakovich had scored for particularly high intensity high frequencies. It’s a minus point which could have been corrected easily enough, but at least the instances are rare and short-lived, and on some equipment (I would venture) may pass entirely unnoticed.

Spittler has also given us a just balance between the sections of the WDRSO. In particular (and wonder of wonders!) the percussion, who have such an unusually important role, are given their proper due. During the writing of this "review", I have heard comments about the percussion at the start of the Fourth, on the one hand complaining of over-dominance and on the other lamenting its lack of prominence! I guess that proves it’s about right? Equally, there have been suggestions that there’s not enough depth in the bass, to which I can only respond, "Well, adjust your tone controls then!" because I was frequently impressed at what was going on down in the basement (the bass drum sound in the fourth movement of the Thirteenth was one awe-inspiring shock to my system - alimentary that is, not audio). Overall, the sound is rich and firm, warm and detailed, and your equipment will simply love you for ever for being given the privilege of reproducing it!

The vocal contributions in Symphonies 2, 3, 13, and 14 are balanced against the orchestra with consummate care. Soloists are where they should be, "up front" but not sitting on your knee, whilst choirs are definitely where they belong, behind the orchestra but not banished to the stair-wells, and sound decently large (the ruination of more than one Berlioz Grande Messe or Te Deum has been the use of what sound like chamber choirs!). The minor choral contributions to the Second and Third are nice and vigorous, but the singing of the men of the Choral Academy Moscow in the Thirteenth is truly phenomenal, an awesome wall of sound threatening to engulf your senses! Soloists, Aleksashkin in the Thirteenth, Simoni and Vaneev in the Fourteenth, sing with immense character and scarcely a trace of the wibbly-wobblies that seem to be de rigeur these days. Also, it’s not just that they sing well, but that they "play their parts" in the acting sense with such dramatic conviction.

The WDRSO approaches what is for me the ideal band to play these symphonies. Shostakovich demands a certain quality of sound, or rather spectrum of sound qualities. In one corner is the "Russians on the razzle" quality: garish, aggressive, coarse. Somehow, the Stiff Collars and Posh Frocks of the top orchestras seem reluctant to loosen their collars (the possible disposition of the frocks I leave to your imaginations!), and instead impose something of their civilised refinement on the music. The WDRSO players on the other hand can sound as if they’re playing in grubby jeans and tatty T-shirts, and that belting out a Russian rugby song is to them the most natural thing in the world. In the opposite corner is the "dreaming in the Dacha" quality: remote, ethereal, musing. Safer ground for the SCs and PFs, but they often forget that the ground beneath their feet is still as common as muck. Enter the WDRSO to play like angels with dirty feet: they can sing as sweetly as anyone, but you won’t catch them trying to hide any of Shostakovich’s gritty accompaniments behind their velour upholstery for fear it might spoil the pristine perfection of their drawing-rooms. In spirit, the WDRSO stand shoulder to shoulder with the Leningrad Phil. of old.

It all starts in the basement: their double-basses sound truly awesome, as if their bows were primed not with horse but with mastodon hair. I lost count of the times I smiled at robust resonances, or at gruff grunts and growlings, or at rosiny runs. This extends, though less obviously, right the way up to the top of the section. They may not be the most refined string band in the world, but they are one of the most colourful and committed, capable of (and demonstrating) sweet song through to bitter acridity, shag-pile Axminster warmth through to liquid nitrogen chill, perky playfulness through to rapid-fire machine-gunning, and corpulence through to scrawniness - and all in the service of the composer.

The brass are a magnificent bunch of roughnecks, though they not once, even though they’re given ample opportunity, drowned out the rest of the orchestra. These discs contain some of the finest orchestral tuba-playing that it has been my pleasure to experience. The trombonists sound as if they were born with slides in their hands, and some of the "up top" sounds of the trumpets really do earn the epithet "golden". Likewise the horns, who can rattle and roll it with the best of them, and still turn on a noble weight to rival the VPO. They also make up an ensemble of satisfying solemnity and tonal breadth.

Shostakovich makes rather special demands of woodwind: he expects them to be able to scream and shrill. The WDRSO woodwind are a wonderful bunch. Individually, they still possess an individuality that is increasingly rare in these days of anodyne international uniformity. Before you’ve got very far, you’ll find yourself greeting a soloist like an old pal. I became particularly chummy with the bassoon and the clarinet. But put them together, and turn up the wick, and their screaming and shrilling are electrifying, thanks not least to piccolos that could slice through thick leather like it was tissue paper.

Then there’re those important people in the kitchen. Sometimes they get a mite tangled up, and I wished, just fleetingly, that they’d done a re-take. The rest of the time (that is, most of the time), I simply luxuriated in the terrific array of sound they produced. The WDRSO tamtam has to be singled out (especially as I am a real sucker for the sound), not just for some superb, towering "swishes" but also for having such an incredibly extensive palette of sonorities. In comparison other tamtams, especially (I seem to remember) the wooly muffler wearer at the Concertgebouw, pale into "Poor Johnny One-Notes", but this one has to be heard to be believed!

Lots of clues start to club together, leading me to suspect that these recordings were cobbled together from takes that were in fact complete live performances. It would explain much, though it would leave us with the probably unanswerable question of "how did they keep the audience so bloody quiet"? At rock bottom, it doesn’t matter, except that (again) it highlights the consistency of performance, which is worth infinitely more than the asking price of a few fluffs.

Of course, in all this I’m not forgetting Barshai, who is ultimately responsible for everything. For every single symphony there will be someone who will point to another recording which is "better". It’s arguable that some of the performances yield nothing to the competition. Numbers 1, 6, 9 and 13 went straight to the top of my list, and it’ll take a real blinder to topple Barshai’s number 14 (I haven’t heard his earlier one - yet!). Yet, the rest of them are at least contenders, barring only number 11, not on account of its performance but of its comparatively sub-standard recording balance. Even taken individually that’s impressive. But there is more, much more.

Looking at this set as a whole, there is something very special indeed, as you can gather from the way I got just a bit carried away in the above. That’s not a facetious remark (not entirely, anyway). If you have read my dissertation on even one symphony, you may have noticed that while I was talking about the performance, I tended to drift back to discussion of the music. I had based my opinions and impressions on not one but several auditions of each work. The upshot was that I became so immersed in the experience that the distinction between the music that Shostakovich wrote and the music that Barshai made became blurred. Work and interpretation melded in my mind. But this clarified my judgement, rather than clouded it. The latter wasn’t likely because I was aware of what was happening. Consequently, much of what I said about the music was in fact equally a comment on Barshai’s performance.

It need hardly be said, but I’ll say it anyway, particularly as after this somebody, somewhere is sure to brand me as a fawning and undiscerning "Barshai groupie". There are two broad approaches to these works, either to go completely OTT, or to play them with some degree of circumspection. There are risks either way. In maximising physical excitement, a conductor at best runs the risk of drowning the real import of the music under a flood of virtuosic brownie-points, and at worst erects a spectacular arboreal facade to cover the fact that his forest is devoid of wood. On the other hand, a performance that on initial exposure seems relatively dull will be reported as such by critics, who usually have deadlines that preclude the luxury of extended (and intensive!) exposure. The danger is that babies may be evicted along with the bathwater. Having enjoyed the aforementioned luxury in abundance, my feeling is that Barshai, whose performances are firmly in the latter camp, is much more a "baby" than he is "bathwater". He has so thoroughly understood these symphonies that if I were told that on a hot day he sweated Shostakovich through his very pores, I’d very likely believe it. His understanding encompasses each symphony both as a whole and as an integral part of the entire cycle, and within his sure grasp of the architecture he more or less unerringly gives each moment its contextual due. However great the temptation, no one climax is ever allowed to exceed its proper place in the larger picture. For me, that creates a far greater impact overall than any consistently high-octane performance.

This set is such a towering achievement that I’m sorely tempted to suggest it rivals the Decca Ring Cycle as some sort of "gramophone classic". It’s one of those few, I might say definitive, complete sets that everyone should have on the shelf. This is high praise indeed, and you would be right to wonder whether I am myself going OTT! Well, I can only affirm that I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t sincerely believe that Barshai thoroughly deserves it. However, after all the brain-bruising listening, I find that I have to end a mite incongruously on a couple of mundane economic notes. Firstly, if you must pick and choose, these recordings are being issued as individual discs by Regis. Secondly, dare I complain about the lack of texts and translations, or a couple of barely half-full discs, when we’re being asked to stump up the best part of twenty five pounds sterling to own a copy? I ask this because, if you don’t believe what I’ve said about it, that’s what it’s going to cost you to prove me wrong.

Paul Serotsky
MusicWeb, August 2002

What can you get for $22 these days? Well, in New York City that would buy you two movie tickets and maybe a candy bar. Most other places you could get a decent meal (for one) at your local no-frills restaurant. But these are fleeting pleasures. What if I told you that for $22 you could get an 11-CD set of the complete Shostakovich symphonies, which would provide countless hours of enjoyment for many years to come? Well it's true. And not only that, Rudolf Barshai's WDR Symphony Orchestra cycle (recorded 1994-2000 in Cologne) is one of the best all around sets available, with idiomatic playing that approaches that of great Russian orchestras and masterful conducting by a man who knew and worked closely with the composer. If you need more convincing, check out the following quick overview.

No. 1: Crystalline textures and tight phrasing characterize this performance, emphasizing the work's neo-classical style (less so it's darkly emotional side).
No. 2: The playing is fleet, propulsive, and colorful, which is exactly what this "steel age" music needs; and the Rundfunkchor sings with revolutionary fervor at the conclusion, clearly articulating the text.
No. 3: Barshai shapes this rambling work into a somewhat coherent musical discourse, but even his sensitive conducting cannot redeem the bland and tasteless choral ending.
No. 4: A smart, biting performance with highly characterful playing from the orchestra. The strings really "kick" in the first movement's whirlwind fugato. The recording's lack of low bass is the only drawback.
No. 5: Barshai's interpretation is stern yet elegant, and his emphasis on the work's classical proportions brilliantly points up the symphony's relationship to Beethoven (as well as Mahler).
No. 6: A great performance; Barshai shapes the first movement beautifully, illuminating the music's underlying passion; the Scherzo is the fastest ever, and it's perfectly played, as is the mercurial finale; great percussion throughout.
No. 7 "Leningrad": A tight, taut opening to what will be a smoothly flowing rendition that's high on feeling but a little short on bombast (which may be a plus for some listeners).
No. 8: Profoundly moving, communicating the work's tragic time in history; Barshai draws some particularly hair-raising sounds from the WDR woodwinds.
No. 9: Magnificent; Shostakovich's subversive, Haydnesque wit and underlying anxiety is made perfectly plain; wonderful brass playing.
No. 10: A lithe, lean, and dramatic reading, with powerful climaxes; the Scherzo is less frantic than some, but no less ferocious.
No. 11 "The Year 1905": Another triumph; Barshai redeems this symphony by reaching beyond the surface cinematography to find the tragic grandeur just beneath.
No. 12 "The Year 1917": Fast tempos give the music an unusual dramatic impetus that outshines the rather foursquare melodic material; clearly this piece works better when it's short and sweet.
No. 13 "Babi Yar": A gripping, intense, take-no-prisoners performance; Barshai draws forth powerfully dark and rich low orchestral sonorities, creating palpable feelings of fear and anxiety while generating tremendous climaxes; bass Sergei Alekshaskin is the voice of authority, doom, and compassion, and he's supported by the Moscow Choral Academy's ferociously powerful singing; this performance alone is worth the price of the set.
No. 14: A masterful interpretation from the man who premiered the work. The string playing is stunning, while Alla Simoni and Vladimir Vaneev realize the music's bitter irony, grim tragedy, and profound sadness in their passionate, at times neurotic performances.
No. 15: Barshai's light touch emphasizes the music's droll qualities and flies directly in the face of ironic and angst-ridden portrayals by Neeme Järvi and Kurt Sanderling; the finale is spectacular.

There you have it, and add to this overall clear, impactful, and nicely reverberant recorded sound and you've got one great Shostakovich cycle. Even though in some cases I lean toward Rozhdestvensky's hysterically intense renderings on Melodiya (while I don't necessarily warm to the screechy sound of those recordings), Barshai's intelligent, humane, passionate, and deeply felt readings undeniably realize the composer's intentions and certainly will stand the test of time. This Brilliant Classics set is such a bargain you almost feel guilty paying so little for it. So now, the choice is yours: you can order this fabulous, eternally rewarding collection of music by one of the 20th century's greatest composers (available in the U.S. from Berkshire Record Outlet), or you can go out for a sandwich at your local diner ...

Victor Carr Jr.
Classics Today, October 2002