LSO LIVE LSO 0030
Listening to Rostropovich’s reading of the Shostakovich eleventh symphony is a shatteringly emotional experience. This live recording is most persuasive using insights gained from the conductor’s friendship with the composer. The playing of the LSO confirms their status as one of the top five orchestras in the world.
This recording was much fêted upon its initial release but the performance was not to every reviewer’s taste. However, I have been caught by the exceptional quality of the interpretation in what is one of Shostakovich’s most underrated scores. The symphony is acknowledged as being difficult to bring off successfully so perhaps I have been waiting for a performance such as this to realise just how great a work it is.
Shostakovich had been commissioned to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the October revolution of 1917. In response he composed this symphony to commemorate the events of the abortive first revolution of 1905, particularly the Bloody Sunday of the ninth of January when the troops of Tsar Nicholas II massacred unarmed civilians who were peacefully demonstrating in front of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The symphony, conceived on a large scale, is programmatic in content. To provide the listener with indications of the meanings of the music Shostakovich provided explicitly descriptive titles for each of the four connected movements.
The exceptional control and intense sensitivity that Rostropovich uses to portray the huge expanses of almost static music contained in the first movement Adagio is the highlight of the disc. Rostropovich draws out with considerable emphasis the virile, militaristic melodies, the agitated brass fanfares and percussive effects which ape the marching of troops and the firing of shots. I almost jumped out of my skin at a couple of points courtesy of the LSO’s wonderfully expressive brass playing. The conductor guides the LSO through the symphony’s grim and contrasting architectural breadth and does so with consummate accomplishment. He creates the necessary atmosphere of brooding tension and expressive power. Experience ferocious violence contrasted with searing heartache in the emotional roller-coaster ride of ‘Tocsin’, the concluding movement.
The version of the eleventh symphony by Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw Orchestra, on Decca digital 411 939-2 has been a personal favourite since its release in 1985. However Haitink cannot compete with the intensity of the Rostropovich reading which is more convincing on all fronts. Incidentally, Rostropovich at just over seventy two minutes takes a massive eleven minutes longer to complete the work. Other highly rated versions by James De Priest and the Helsinki PO on Delos digital D/C 3080, Vladimir Ashkenazy with the St. Petersburg PO on Decca digital 448 179-2 and André Cluytens’s forty five year old recording with the French RO on Testament SBT 1099 are now all clearly superceded by this new Rostropovich reading which I feel sets a convincing new benchmark.
The bone-dry acoustic in the Barbican assists the depiction of the harrowing and brutal events of that icy cold and snow covered Russian winter. The sound quality is exceptional with few audience distractions and the sound enginers have dispensed with the applause.
A superb performance together with excellent sound quality make this a benchmark recording and my top CD choice of the year. Shostakovich fans will ignore this release at their peril.
Michael Cookson
This stunning performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 was recorded live at a series of concerts in London to celebrate Rostropovich’s 75th birthday last March. Conducting works by composers Rostropovich had known (Britten, Prokofiev and Shostakovich) all the concerts were notable for the intensity of the playing and the incandescence of the conductor, perhaps now at the zenith of his interpretative skills.
The Shostakovich was ecstatically received by London’s critics, and Rostropovich was given a standing ovation after the first concert performance of the symphony. How odd, therefore, that LSO Live should remove applause, which they had the misfortune to leave intact in their recording of Elgar’s First Symphony under Colin Davis, a much less notable recording than this one. If any recent live performance justifies the inclusion of applause it is this Shostakovich Eleventh, a helter-skelter of emotion and intensity.
The symphony is neither one of the composer’s best (suffering from the same bombast that disfigures the Twelfth) nor one of his most heard in the concert hall. Partly for that reason it is easier to be persuaded by the sheer bravura of this performance; ones of the Fifth, Eighth and Tenth nowadays lack the very quality this recording has in spades: a sense of newness, and a sense of rawness to the playing it is rare to hear from Western orchestras. Some years ago Bernard Haitink conducted two performances of the Eighth with the London Symphony Orchestra which, because they were so perfectly and so beautifully played, left this writer quite unmoved. That symphony simply cannot be played like that and actually mean anything. Rostropovich is a different animal altogether; the playing is superlative throughout, but there is a volcanic power underpinning an interpretation of wild dynamic extremes. Only a truly great orchestra can play pianissimos with the ghostly restlessness we hear in the opening movement (piano playing that has a kaleidoscope of inner-meaning to it); at the other extreme, such as the brass band fanfares in the second movement, only a truly great conductor can open up the multitude of textures so every instrument is given an inner clarity. Orchestra and conductor work together in such a symbiotic way that this recording actually seems the more remarkable for it.
The Eleventh is contemporaneous with events in Hungary in 1956, yet, like all of Shostakovich’s symphonies after the Fourth, the work seems to invite universal truths into its interpretations and interpreters. Few conductors are more crushing in the climaxes of this work than Rostropovich, and even fewer are as tender in the more eerily quiet sections of the symphony. Rostropovich’s interpretation is based on a broad latitude of suffering most conductors simply do not bring to the symphonies of Shostakovich, and this is the very reason this particular performance can only be compared with the very greatest: Mravinsky in Prague in 1967 (available on Praga PR 254018) and in Leningrad in 1957 (on Russian Disc RDCD 11157).
The symphony must be a nightmare to record live, given that the balances are so extreme in the work. The LSO engineers do not entirely succeed – in the final movement from about 6’00 to 7’46 the sound seems congested, and the strings sound almost metallic and slightly grate on the ear. Moreover, playback needs to be at a very high volume to produce sufficient bass in the recording, a real problem when the dynamics of the work are so broadly based. When this performance is loud it is very loud; when it is quiet it is almost inaudible.
Despite this, it is a remarkable disc of a remarkable concert. Listen to the disc from 15’30 in the final movement to the work’s close (a sonorous gong) and you will experience world class playing allied with incredible musicianship. It is certainly the finest recording of the modern era.
Marc Bridle
It seems like only yesterday, but I reviewed Rostropovich’s National Symphony Orchestra CD (Teldec 9031-76262-2) of this same work about nine years ago—see Fanfare 17:3. I liked the recording, but apparently more for its details than for its overall merits. I wrote that it was hard to choose between Rostropovich, Haitink, DePreist, and Järvi, not because they were so similar, but because they were so different.
The older, wiser me finds my recommendations back then a little strange. I still like the older Rostropovich recording, though. I am sad to report that this new live version is a pale echo of its predecessor. There’s little to recommend it. Last time, I liked the menacing brass in the second movement, and the sound of the bells in the last movement, and these details please me now too. However, Rostropovich and the National Symphony Orchestra were vital, dramatic, imaginative, and committed. Sadly, Rostropovich and the London Symphony Orchestra are none of those things. The orchestra sounds bored and sloppy, and Rostropovich allows (I would hate to think encourages) bombast, perhaps to compensate for the lack of real excitement. The new performance is just a few minutes longer, yet it seems much slower, and Rostropovich pulls tempos around with little feeling for the music’s structure. I know this is a difficult symphony to pull off, but—geez, Louise—there’s no excuse for the mess it has become here.
The engineering is brilliant, although it lacks depth. The performance should have been at least that lucky. Not recommended.
Raymond Tuttle
Fanfare Magazine, November-December 2002