While Litton’s Shostakovich on Dorian and Delos has come in for critical ‘stick’ his way with the strings especially in weighting and voicing moments of trembling expectancy and loneliness is completely convincing. Hamelin too approaches this music as if it is intrinsically of value rather than an amusing excrescence out of the main run of the symphonies. This he does despite Shostakovich’s evident intentions to entertain and not challenge unduly. Imagine if there had been a third concerto written in the mid-1960s with a surly depressive-introspective character? It could have happened but we only have these two concertos which although having their moments of reflection seem relaxed beside the quartets and symphonies and even beside the cello concertos and violin concertos. They stand closer to the suites, film scores, ballets and theatre music - even there they are not completely birds of a feather.

Hamelin is not content to leave it there though. In some senses he and Litton make the two concertos anew. The First Concerto which to me has always stood a dismally poor fourth place to the Second’s first place is most sensitively imagined. I have already commented on the snowy remoteness of the violins in the first movement but in the second the remote trumpet croons in a way I have never heard achieved before. The momentary third movement makes little impression but the finale with its Respighian ‘circus ring’ role for the trumpet is as sprightly and brisk as you could wish though without the rough edge of the Previn/Vacchiano version on Sony. Trumpeter William O’Keeffe makes an ‘event’ out of his role with every droop and impudence of his role savoured. There is nothing at all routine about this. I dreaded hearing the First Concerto but actually enjoyed this!

Back onto secure ground and we come to the Second Concerto. This work pays its dues to the Soviet-compliant genre of the life-enhancing ‘Youth’ concerto. Kabalevsky wrote four of these for the piano. None of those has had quite the success of the Shostakovich even if the composer was ‘slumming it’. In the case of this concerto my reference is the Sony version directed and played by Bernstein. I have loved this since being introduced to the work through an SBRG prefix CBS LP ‘played to death’ to me at our digs in Bristol in 1971-3. Here the high excitement of the squealing Scottish woodwind make something special of the rattling mettlesome outer movements. The plangently romantic middle movement is given a grave rather than sweetened twist which some may regret. I refuse to let go of my Bernstein recommendation but if you want non-pareil sound and a stunning performance then this is now the place to go.

Looking back over the various versions you will find much to enjoy in the playing of Dimitri Alexeev (CFP), Marshev (Danacord) and Eugene List (BMG) and Ortiz (EMI). I have not heard the versions by Ogdon, Rudy or Leonskaja although they have been well received. The composer’s and his son’s versions are hors de combat and in a special authoritative category.

Rather than reaching towards the films to find other Shostakovich for piano and orchestra Hyperion try out some Rodion Shchedrin, a piano pupil of Yakov Flier and composition student of Yuri Shaporin (come on Hyperion - how about giving us Shaporin’s 1933 symphony!). There are six piano concertos the latest of which was played at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam in August 2003. The Second Piano Concerto was premiered by the composer with Rozhdestvensky conducting. It was toured throughout Europe with the Leningrad Phil and Mravinsky in 1966. This comes as an icy douche after the two Shostakovich concertos. The piano seems to move threateningly closer to the listener.

I reviewed a valuable though now deleted BMG disc (BMG-Melodiya 74321 36907-2) of the first three Shchedrin piano concertos in 1998. This involved the composer as soloist and the USSR SO conducted by Evgeny Svetlanov. The recordings were inscribed live at a single concert on 5 May 1974 at the Grand Hall, of the Moscow Conservatoire. In 1998 I described the concerto as ‘densely atonal but [with] interest … kept alive by some explosive and seethingly active textures’. This remains the effect but now presented to us in the best of digital sound. Hamelin splashes and smashes is way through the thickets and surprises us with the jazzy Lionel Hampton sophistication of the writing in the finale. The three movements are Dialogues, Improvisations and Contrasts.

Rob Barnett

Somewhere at the bottom of Shostakovich’s Russo-Soviet soul lurked more than a bit of . . . Poulenc. At least, that’s the conclusion one can draw from this new recording of Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto. Well-conceived and performed with the panache one might expect from these principals, this is among the more idiosyncratic recordings of Shostakovich in recent years.

What makes it distinctive is the decision to mirror successive thematic sections of differing emotional weights each on its own terms, without reference to surrounding material. This means that we’re treated to a collage of frequently shifting tempos, timbres, and dynamics, bound together only by a discreet highlighting of connective, mostly athematic phrases when they occur. The contrast with a more traditional approach to this work (first encountered on the composer’s original pair of recordings from the mid-1950s, now available on Yedang CT 10022 and EMI 5 62648 2) could not be more stark. Other versions sweep through the kaleidoscopic material of the first and third movements at a deliberately breakneck speed. Litton/Hamelin refuse to do so, and the First Piano Concerto sounds like a very different work. The degree to which these forces carefully limn each phrase’s contours only heightens thematic contrast, in a work where such distinctions have traditionally been ignored.

From this change, others follow. Most notably, the stridently militaristic trumpet solos (which have in recent years been regarded by some as Shostakovich’s crypto-symbol for Stalinist officialdom) of other recordings of this work have no edge, here; and the concerto’s humor, though not dulled, comes across as gentler in comparison. Expressive and delicate sentiment gains a foothold in the slow movement.

In the slow movement of the Second Concerto, that foothold becomes a triumphant territorial claim. It’s a movement that’s always been regarded uneasily by musicians and musicologists, who suspect some private joke (between father and son, as Shostakovich wrote the work for performance by his son, Maxim) in the startling transformation of musical content from the lighthearted silliness of the surrounding movements to the twilight nostalgia of Rachmaninoff. Unlike performers of most other renditions, Litton/Hamelin explicitly accept its sincerity, and this alters the contours of the entire work. Where the first and third movements of their recording are within 20 seconds each of Shostakovich’s EMI version, their slow movement clocks in at 7:18 - in contrast to 5:33 for Cluytens/Shostakovich. I’m not sure the two allegro movements are up to the challenge of providing enough counterbalancing substance under this interpretative treatment; but it’s certainly different.

As David Fanning points out in his liner notes, the music of Shchedrin brings to mind Prokofiev rather than Shostakovich in its aggressive energy and primary colors. I would add that its sense of humor and delight in startling its audience are also features Shchedrin holds in common with Prokofiev. It’s good to hear a recording of this work - or indeed any of the six piano concertos by Shchedrin, as no others are currently available. (The 1974 recording of his first and third concertos, an attractive release with the composer at the keyboard, was last seen on Melodiya 36907, and deleted several years ago.) This is a brilliantly driven, often slyly witty piece that places dodecaphonic elements within a tonal framework.

Both conductor and pianist find complex textures and a broad range of dynamics in a composition that might just as easily be tossed off as a jeu d’esprit . Litton brings persuasive depth to the beautiful Shostakovich-like unison theme (so like his more desolate symphonic landscapes) in the final movement, and a measured drive that never loses its focus. Less in the spotlight for this work, Hamelin astutely seconds his conductor’s efforts, offering a range of touch that varies from the featherweight to the brutally explosive. This team seems to lack only a kind of manically propulsive glee where required. As a result, the conclusion of the finale misses the assertive athleticism it demands, though there’s no dearth of musicality from the participants. That applies to the BBC Scottish SO as well, which delivers the goods with a vitality, polish, and sense of individuality that some better-known orchestras might envy.

My only significant complaint about this release is the unnaturally forward presence of the piano in the two Shostakovich works. True, Hamelin is the soloist, and the star; but I don’t think the composer envisioned the piano sounding louder than the orchestra. This certainly does bring out unheard detail in some passages where the instrument is merely providing accompaniment, but at the expense of drawing attention to the odd balance. The engineering is otherwise exemplary.

For the Shchedrin, this album is definitely worth the purchase price, and the non-traditionalist interpretation of the Shostakovich concertos makes it a favored alternate. Recommended.

Barry Brenesal
Fanfare Magazine, May-June 2004