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5.0 out of 5 stars
Remarkable music in splendid performances, September 30, 2010
This review is from: Shostakovich: The Gamblers; Fleishman/Shostakovich: Rothschild's Violin (Audio CD)
Veniamin Fleishman (1913-1941) began his opera Rothschild's Violin, based on Chekhov, while he was studying under Shostakovich, but he volunteered for the People's Volunteer Guard and was killed in combat in 1941. Shostakovich thought highly of his student, and rescued the manuscript from Leningrad, scored it (in 1943-1944) and attempted - apparently unsuccessfully - to get it staged. According to the older composer "[i]t's a marvellous opera - sensitive and sad. There are no cheap effects in it; it is wise and very Chekhovian." It was obviously a labor of love and the result, while obviously bearing the stamp of Shostakovich, is a splendid work, well-balanced and well-paced, generally sad and ingenious in its incorporation of Jewish folk music. It is far more than a curiosity, and deserves the exposure it has received and more (another recording exists, but I have not heard it), especially for the remarkable orchestral postlude.
Shostakovich's own, unfinished opera The Gamblers (based on Gogol, not Dostoyevsky, as Prokofiev's opera) is an apt coupling. The composer never got beyond the first act, viewing the work as unstageable (although a completion by Krzyszof Meyer exists and has been recorded). The first act was penned in 1941-42 and is striking in itself, even if it is in the end, slightly too wordy (in fact, it appears that Shostakovich intended to do a word-for-word adaption). All the roles are male, and all the action takes part in a single room where a group of card players try to cheat and swindle each other. The score, however, is full of Shostakovich's trademarks; acerbic takes on Wagner, snippets of wonderful tunes, dramatic, almost bizarre orchestral outbursts and tongue in cheek humor. It is, indeed, a pity that Shostakovich never got around to completing it.
Both works, given the performances here (taped live), are magnificent calling cards for RLPO's young chief conductor Vasily Petrenko. Petrenko displays a remarkable understanding of both composers' idioms, and manages to convey the special characteristics of Fleishman's compositional voice through Shostakovich's completion. And despite the fine contributions from the cast, it is really the orchestral contributions that stand out; the playing is spirited and vigorous, totally committed, technically brilliant and full of momentum and sparkle. I have few complaints about the singers either, whose characterizations are uniformly vivid and whose actually singing is overall very good, despite a slight tendency to overuse vibrato among some of the performers, especially in the Gamblers. Still, this is something of a must for anyone with an interest in Shostakovich (either musically or biographically or both). Sound quality is excellent and the presentation very good.
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