Customer Reviews

Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 4 - 9 ("The War Symphonies")

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The symphonies presented in this collection comprise the ones most folks are familiar with (the 11th would likely be next in line). Gergiev is full of spirit, and the recording quality is very good.

I often end up comparing these interpretations with those of the Rostropovich recordings (of which I own the relatively newly released 5th, 8th and 11th). For me, having both is the right answer. Rostropovich's 5th is a bit more relaxed and perhaps a bit more ironic. The ending is almost too slow, but effective enough. Gergiev's 5th is far more vivacious. (On an unrelated note, I really don't care for the tuning of the timpani at the opening of the finale.) In general, Gergiev chooses swifter tempii than Rostropovich; perhaps it's an age thing?

I'm a huge fan of the 4th on this disc... and I quite like how the 8th is presented as well. My only wish is for a complete run of the symphonies to be produced by this conductor/orchestra combo.

This is another of those landmark recordings that any Shostakovich fan needs to have; the related DVD documentary is nice as well, even if a bit superficial.

We'll pass over how anyone stretches the term "war symphony" to include three works written in the 30s and one written after the war ended. Gergiev's are among the best modern recordings of Sym. #4, #5, #7, and #9. I was decidedly less impressed by Sym. #8, which was recorded a decade earlier than the others. It feels technically raw and has inferior sonics compared to what came after. In fact, the hybrid SACD vresion of Sym. #4 that I play on my regular two-channel CD equipment surpasses even the excellent Haitink recording from Decca.

The real problem here is economic: most serious collectors will already own most if not all of these recordings. To tempt us to pay a lot of money for duplications, Philips provides one new item: Sym. #6. I would call Gergiev's performance a bit uninspired--this is a work that needs total commitment to come off at its best, and we are still waiting for a modern reading that equals the passion of Mravinsky's classic LP recordings on Melodiya. Meanwhile, rather than lay out $60, I'll make do with the Sixth from Temirkanov on RCA--it's cut from the same cloth as Gergiev's but is just that much more intense. (The slack Jansons recording on EMI is a disappointing miss.)

Valery Gergiev has produced some of the most compelling new performances of Shostakovich's symphonies in recent years with his Kirov Orchestra of St. Petersburg. The 4th, 7th and combined 5th/9th discs included here are superb and well worth hearing (see my reviews). However, including the 6th (a lesser work) and the 8th (not one of the best performances) and calling it "The War Symphonies" (which is not historically accurate) does not justify buying this set instead of buying those three discs separately.

DSCH's 7th, 8th and 9th Symphonies are his World War II symphonies -- most of the 7th was famously written during the Siege of Leningrad, when Shostakovich was photographed in his fireman's helmet, which was the basis for a Time magazine cover drawing. The 8th was also written during the war, and the 9th was written shortly afterward, and both provoked the displeasure of Stalin and the culture commissars for lacking an appropriately heroic tone. As far as I know, Gergiev has yet to record the 10th, one of DSCH's best. What you want at a minimum in a set of Shostakovich symphonies is the four best -- the 4th, 5th, 8th and 10th. If Gergiev wanted to stretch "War Symphonies" back into the '30s, he could have stretched it slightly forward into the '50s!

Perhaps Gergiev has in mind that the 4th and 5th Symphonies of the 1930s reflect Stalin's Terror, which could be seen as an internal war on the Russian people. If so, this is quite legitimate, and is hinted at by the cover art -- Gergiev holding open the score, as if to say "listen to the music itself rather than assuming that there is one correct political or ideological interpretation of what it means." Shostakovich, to the best of my knowledge, was pro-Russian, and in a more complex way pro-Soviet, but definitely not pro-Stalin, which leads to a complex stance when the question is a German war of aggression against Russia when that Russia was led by Stalin. To my ears (and DSCH was to have said his music's meaning was clear to "those with ears to hear"), the music is deeply human, and deeply tragic. The 8th especially is a powerful statement against the horror of war, not a celebration of any political regime (see my review of the superb recording by Haitink).

See my list SHOSTAKOVICH: A LISTENER'S GUIDE for more on the great Dmitri Shostakovich.