The debate about “meaning” in Dmitri Shostakovich’s output has gone on for almost 30 years, so some may be unaware that there once was a time when interpretations of his scores were derived not from commentaries but only the music.
Shostakovich’s reputation had waxed and waned in the United States; Sergei Prokofiev, who recently had died (1953), then was thought the greater composer. But the standing of Shostakovich’s music had not been determined by uncertainty over what particular passages had “meant.” Appreciate them or not, recordings by his early champions were, in fact, clear in overall expression.
Like photographic prints made close to the time the images were shot, these recordings bring us closer to the creator’s inspiration, partly by having shared in his world and values. But beyond that — as months of comparisons again have proven to me — they simply convey better than any other recordings the largeness and intensity of his vision.
Shostakovich’s son Maxim has said: “He did not write about this war and that revolution, but about war and revolution in general, the state of mind and emotion, not facts.” So the power of his music comes from its despair, rage and mockery, not the people or events that prompted them. And it does not matter if a particular work ends in real or false high spirits, for throughout the whole of his output, comedy is manic and fleeting, tragedy omnipresent.
All this is overpoweringly communicated by the following recordings:
Symphony No. 1 — Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski (1933, Pearl). No one got as much out of Shostakovich’s slow movements as Stokowski, his finest American interpreter, who already in the first recording of a work assumed to be only bright and nose-thumbing found the vein of pathos.
“Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” — Galina Vishnevskaya, Nicolai Gedda, Dimiter Petkov, London Philharmonic, Mstislav Rostropovich (1978, EMI). A harrowing interpretation of the opera that ran for 200 performances before it ran afoul of Josef Stalin, who allegedly sat over its brass section, recoiling from the “un-Soviet” tawdriness he heard.
Symphony No. 4 — City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle (1994, EMI). The hourlong Mahler-inspired juggernaut that was withdrawn from rehearsals in 1936 and not premiered until a quarter century later is heard in one of the few contemporary recordings of any Shostakovich symphony to rank with the fiercest pioneers.
Symphony No. 5 — Leningrad Philharmonic, Yevgeny Mravinsky (1938, Doremi). The first recording of the most popular Shostakovich symphony, which had it been reissued sooner might have settled how the closing pages should go; they crawl, as they often do again today, though now less because of the music than prose that continues to falsely make the composer into a political dissident.
Symphony No. 8 — Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky (1944, private issue). Koussevitzky, one of the greatest proponents of modern music, said this was a score “which by the power of its human emotion surpasses everything else created in our time.” A studio recording of the vast first movement (on Biddulph) shows that was not hyperbole, but the rest of his incomparable approach can only be heard in an earlier concert performance from dubs of his own crumbly acetates (available from Nathan Brown, P.O. Box 94673 Albuquerque, N.M. 87199).
Trio No. 2 in E minor — Dmitri Tsyganov, Sergei Shirinsky, Shostakovich (1945, Doremi). At 11, Shostakovich played Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” and was on his way to becoming a piano virtuoso. Later he played piano in a Leningrad movie theater. Here he joins members of the Beethoven Quartet, with whom he worked for nearly 40 years, in the premiere recording of his searing piano trio.
Violin Concerto No. 1 — David Oistrakh; New York Philharmonic; Dimitri Mitropoulos (1955, Sony). The first recording of this nocturnal masterwork was made by the dedicatee not in Russia but the United States, with a volatile conductor who only once before (see next entry) and never again achieved such poetic fire on disc.
Symphony No. 10 — New York Philharmonic, Dimitri Mitropoulos (1954, Sony). More than half a century later, no one has probed deeper than this, the performance that crowned the conductor’s recording career and established the work near the height of Shostakovich’s Fourth and Eighth symphonies.
Symphony No. 11, “The Year 1905” — Houston Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski (1958, EMI). The most successful of Shostakovich’s idealized program symphonies on a recording that recently was surpassed in sound (by Mikhail Pletnev and the Russian National Orchestra) but still is alone in atmosphere and elegiac feeling.
Cello Concerto No. 1 — Mstislav Rostropovich, Leningrad Philharmonic, Gennady Rozhdestvensky (1961, BBC Legends). As with Oistrakh, the dedicatee of this concerto recorded it first, vividly, in the United States. But the all-important horn solos were too refined, without the vibrato and intensity of Russian brass, so this more dangerous concert performance from two years later takes precedence.
String Quartet No. 8 — Borodin Quartet (1990, Virgin Classics). The second string quartet with whom Shostakovich had a long association was the Borodin, here heard on the poignant last of their recordings of his most self-reflexive work, the one he called his own requiem.
Symphony No. 14 — Galina Vishnevskaya, Mark Reshetin, English Chamber Orchestra, Benjamin Britten (1970, BBC Legends). Britten had dedicated a church parable to Shostakovich, who responded with this song cycle about death. The recording of Rudolf Barshai’s Moscow premiere, which has a passage excised from all other versions, has disappeared, but here with the same vocalists is the commanding first performance in the West.
The next step
Symphonies Nos. 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, “Song of the Forests” — Yevgeny Mravinsky, Leningrad Philharmonic (6 Melodiya CDs). Tense, authoritative performances by the conductor and orchestra closest to the composer.
String Quartets Nos. 1-15 — Beethoven Quartet (5 Consonance CDs). Nearly all Shostakovich’s string quartets received first performances from the Beethoven Quartet, which followed with nonpareil recordings on Soviet LPs; excepting No. 5, they returned briefly on these American CDs, for which a search is recommended.
“Dmitry Shostakovich Speaks” (4 Melodiya LPs). Talks, interviews and addresses by the composer from 1941 to 1973, with 20 pages of English translations and reproductions of rare photographs. Available at www.Kamkin.com.
“Dmitri Shostakovich: Sonata for Viola,” by Semyon Aranovich and Alexander Sokurov (Facets/Ideale Audience DVD). The restored version of a stark 1981 documentary that looks back from the final, haunted Sonata on Shostakovich’s entire career; it lightly passes over his censures by the Soviet government but still got banned and was literally buried to escape destruction.
