Customer Reviews

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11 - The Year 1905

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If you had to have only one version of Shostakovich 11 it would have to be this. All round the performance has the best balance of vitality, freshness, power and urgency of any and is more vividly recorded than almost any subsequent version. The only serious contenders are Stokowski and Mravinsky but the Moscow Stokowski version is overdriven to the point of hysteria and sounds like it was recorded over the telephone whereas the Houston Stokowski is superb in the slow movements but needs a bit more pungency in the dramatic sections. On the other hand Mravinsky is excoriating at almost every opportunity but tends to leave no breathing space and rather skates over the surface of the adagios. The Cluytens is the ideal combination of dramatic bite and sustained tension and had the benefit of collaborative advice from the composer, who was present throughout the recording sessions.

To me, the Shostakovich 11th, premiered in 1957, is a suspiciously mawkish tribute to the innocent citizens mowed down by the Czar's Cossacks in the bitter cold of January, 1905. The music is programmatic and as easy to follow as a Hollywood soundtrack -- we witness historical tableuax from the first public gathering at dawn in Palace Square, St. Petersburg to the massacre, a period of mourning, and then the wild ringing of the tocsin that sounds the promise of a victorious future, i.e., the October Revolution of 1917. It's always uncomfortable when Shostakovich does his duty as a loyal Soviet artist-- a "people's composer" -- and it helps only somewhat that he later told interviewers that this work, although supposedly a paean to revolutionary glory, was actually a covert criticism of Moscow's brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

However it is viewed, the Shostakovich 11th is problematic musically, needing a great deal of help to get beyond its rum-tum depiction of patriotic blood and tears. It seems unlikely that a Belgian-born conductor leading a French radio orchestra would come close to the ideal, but Andre Cluytens had the composer at hand in Paris in 1958. They had just made a classic recording of Shostakovich's two piano concertos with him as soloist. This recording of the Eleventh, released in good-enough stereo for the first time by Testament, also deserves to be considered a classic. It eschews mawkishness; nothing is overblown; as much as possible, it creates a rhetoric-free zone. Also, it helps that the peculiarly tangy sound of a French orchestra (the ORTF, well regarded at the time) lends piquancy to the symphony's simple tunes and minimal development.

Compared to the other recording of the Shostakovich 11th made in 1958, by Stokowski and the Houston Sym., the Cluytens is much less famous; to this day lazy critics cite the Stokowski as best in show despite its less than ideal playing and the conductor's tendency to add a glossy surface to music that needs exactly the oppoiste. Cluytens' account has the right grit and rawness where it counts. His opening movement is an atmospheric Adagio that doesn't lay on the doom too thickly. The battle scene that follows is punched out with prominent timpani, stopping short of hysteria. This isn't first-rate music but it is exciting scene painting, and Cluytens doesn't stint. The mournful Adagio that follows is taken slower than on Mravinsky's all-but-definitive recording with the Leningrad Phil. on Praga (13:59 min. compared to 11:30 min.), but the pace suits the spare, muted melody that mourns the dead over a plucked bass. Anger follows grief, and the interjections from brass and low woodwinds convey suitable menace. In the finale Cloytens heeds Mravinsky's example with a breakneck tempo that maximizes the music's excitement while minimizing its crassness.

Clearly I'm not a great admirer of the Shostakovich 11th, but anyone who is will find a rewarding performance here, and for other doubters, this is the recording to get if you want to hear the music stripped of seamy Soviet turgidity.