Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Orchestral Songs: Vocal Symphonic Music
Rundfunk-Kinderchor Berlin, Kölner Rundfunkchor
Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester/Michail Jurowski
rec. 1994-96
English translations of texts, no Russian originals
Capriccio C7465 [4 CDs: 241]
The avalanche of Shostakovich recordings we are experiencing this year, half a century after his death, is unsurprising. But Capriccio are doing yeoman service by boxing reissues of some of the more recondite areas of his output. I have recently reviewed the excellent box of Jazz Suites, and here we are again with orchestral songs. The pieces are more varied than that title suggests. We have plenty of songs with orchestral accompaniment, including the wonderful song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry and the three Pushkin Romances. But you will also find the Suite from the early opera The Nose, the chilling cantata The Execution of Stepan Razin, and the five Intermezzi from Katarina Ismailova (better known as Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk). So, a very mixed bag, but no less absorbing for that.
First on CD1 is the cantata The Sun Shines over our Motherland. This opens beguilingly enough, but then… In the years following World War II, the Stalin regime cast Shostakovich for the second time as ‘public enemy number one’, largely because of the Leader and Teacher’s objection to the caustic and enigmatic Ninth Symphony. After a public denunciation by propagandist-in-chief Andrei Zhdanov, Shostakovich kept a very low profile for a couple of years. He concentrated largely on chamber music, and on earnest attempts to improve his standing with the authorities (and maybe to protect his life and career). He wrote works full of apparent patriotic fervour, in keeping with the notion of socialist realism.
The cantata becomes more and more strenuous as it proceeds. The text expresses the glories of Soviet agriculture and ground-clearance after the war. The exhausting music piles one exclamatory key change after another, one colossal noisy climax on top of another.
The Song of the Forests, is, if anything, even more egregious in this respect. What is more, it effectively anticipates part of one of Shostakovich’s most irritating pieces, the Festive Overture of 1954. One has to feel sympathy for the orchestra, soloists and especially the choirs, including the beautiful children’s voices, who sing their hearts out in the most selfless way.
But despair not! In between these two unprepossessing works is something quite wonderful: the Suite from The Nose, Shostakovich’s first opera, written when he was 24. This astonishingly original and daring music no doubt warned the more conservative elements in the regime that the young composer might become the source of trouble.
The opera, loosely based on a tale by Nikolai Gogol, tells of a government official, Kovalyov. His nose leaves his face one morning and runs off to pursue a life of its own. If I had to select one number as a must-hear, it would be the song of Ivan, Kovalyov’s servant. It is set for tenor, with hilarious accompaniment by, I kid you not, balalaika and flexatone. (That strange instrument seems to have enjoyed a brief period of popularity with Soviet composers around this time. Khachaturian used it in his Piano Concerto.) Jurowski and his WDR Symphony Orchestra of Köln give a brilliant performance of this terrific suite.
CD2 begins with an acknowledged masterpiece, the cantata The Execution of Stepan Razin. The composer described it as a poem for bass, choir and orchestra, set to the verses by Yevgeny Yevtushensko. Shostakovich and the great poet were friends and allies, and the composer was a fervent admirer. He once said: “Every morning, in place of prayers, I reread or repeat by memory two poems by Yevtushenko.”
The cantata tells the spine-tingling story of the Cossack hero Stepan Razin, executed after he led an uprising against the tsar in the 1670s. At the execution, his severed head continued to spit at and mock the terrified tsar. The score is alive with lurid instrumental and choral effects. Bass Stanislav Sulejmanov is also the soloist in The Song of the Forests.There, he seemed to be struggling to take the work seriously, with an exaggeratedly buffo edge to his singing. Here he gives a suitably dark character to his embodiment of the central heroic figure.
The great crisis of Shostakovich’s life, creative and personal, was precipitated by Stalin’s attendance in 1936 at a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The criticism he received made him radically re-assess his music. The 5th Symphony was the almost immediate outcome. The opera is now accepted as one of the major works of 20th century music drama. The five ‘Intermezzos’, as the booklet has it, coming between various scenes, encapsulate the fearless originality of the score. Four of the Intermezzi are short, sharp character pieces. The central one, a massive Passacaglia, seethes with tragic emotion.
The Two Fables after Krylov complete the disc; Ivan Krylov was a fabulist to rival Aesop. This is a welcome lowering of the temperature after the feverish Lady Macbeth extracts.
CD3 is where the title Orchestral Songs is properly justified. First comes one of Shostakovich’s latest and greatest pieces, the Suite on Verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti. Afterwards, he only composed two works: the setting of Dostoyevsky’s Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin and the Viola Sonata. The suite contains eleven songs, settings of eight sonnets, a madrigal, an epigram and an epitaph.
1975 was the 500th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth. Shostakovich selected the texts for his composition in 1974, and gave them his own titles. He wanted to pay tribute to one of the most remarkable men in European history: painter of the Sistine chapel, sculptor of David and author of these wonderful, intimate poems.
Benjamin Britten had set seven of the sonnets while he stayed stay in America during World War II. The two composers met on several occasions, the first in 1960, and had established a close friendship. It seems likely that Britten introduced Shostakovich to Michelangelo’s works, though Shostakovich set translations into Russian. They are songs of an almost overwhelming, painful intensity, and without doubt among his greatest works. Indeed, when very near to death, he told his son Maxim that he regarded the Suite as his Sixteenth Symphony. The bass here, Stanislav Sulejmanov, sings in the most heartfelt and emotional way. This is, for me, the highlight of the entire set.
The Six Romances on Words by Japanese Poets come from the opposite end of Shostakovich’s career. He wrote them when he was just twenty-three. They are remarkable for their degree of atonality and expressive dissonance. Tenor Vladimir Kazatschuk grapples heroically with the angular vocal lines, without ever sounding completely at ease with them. On the other hand, bass Anatoly Babykin gives the Three Romances on Poems by Alexander Pushkin a stylish and sympathetic reading. This is music Shostakovich wrote in that strange lull between the Lady Macbeth debacle and the 5th Symphony. The first of the songs, Regeneration, has a tangible connection with the 5th, not only in its vocal line but in the thoughtful ostinato in the violins that recurs in the finale of the symphony.
CD4 begins with the eleven songs in the cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry. Shostakovich was a Gentile but he felt the deepest sympathy for the Jews because of their treatment not only by the Nazis, but also in the terrible Russian pogroms and later persecutions. He clearly loved Jewish music. Its influence can be found in many of his works, notably the second Piano Trio and of course the 13th Symphony, named Babi Yar after the site of the most dreadful mass murder by the Nazis. Yes, the songs in the cycle are mournful, but they are also very beautiful, and the three soloists do them full justice. In this orchestral version which Shostakovich made shortly after the original version with piano, the accompaniment is as important as the vocal parts. Jurowski and his players give it a sharp characterisation.
Six Poems by Marina Tsvetayava, another very late composition, sets poems of the great Russian symbolist poet of the early 20th century. Shostakovich wrote them for contralto and piano in 1973, and then orchestrated them. The poems are haunting. His melodic lines and again his orchestral textures match that quality. The most striking of all is the final song, a deeply moving tribute to Tsvetayeva’s fellow poet Anna Akhmatova. The soloist, alto Tamara Sinyavskaya, deals well with the generally low tessitura of these songs, and gives a committed performance.
Shostakovich was a great reader, especially of poetry, even if largely in Russian translation. We have already had here settings of poems from Italy and Japan. The final tracks bring us verses by Sir Walter Raleigh, Robert Burns and William Shakespeare. The Six Romances are, after the agony of the other cycles, comparatively light-hearted. A jaunty melody for the piccolo runs through Rabbie Burns’s Comin’ through the rye. To sign off, we have the shortest number in the whole box, The King’s Campaign, otherwise known as ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’.
The booklet is a mixed blessing. Michael Struck-Schloen’s notes are extensive if a little rambling. My chief grumble is that the all-important texts appear only in English translations, so are of limited use. Even if, like me, you do not read Russian, it is enormously useful to have a transliterated text to follow. (That is, for example, the case of Bernard Haitink’s Decca recording of the Jewish Folk Poetry songs.)
If you can survive the agitprop pieces on CD1 (after all, they are a significant element of the overall picture of Shostakovich the man and the composer), you will find this box full to the brim with masterpieces, given in mostly excellent performances. All the works here have been recorded elsewhere, but to have them in one box is very valuable.
Gwyn Parry-Jones
Contents
CD1
The Sun Shines over our Motherland, op.90 (1952)
Suite from the opera The Nose, op.15a (1930)
Song of the Forests, op.81 (1949)
rec. 1996, Philharmonie Köln
CD2
The Execution of Stepan Razin, op.119 (1964)
Intermezzos from the opera Katharina Ismailova (original version 1934)
Two Fables after Krylov, op.4 (1928)
rec. 1996, Philharmonie Köln
CD3
Suite on Verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti, op.145a (1975)
Six Romances on Words by Japanese Poets, op.21 (1928)
Three Romances on Poems by Alexander Pushkin, op.46a (1936-1937)
rec. 1996, Philharmonie Köln (Suite), 1995, Studio Stolberger Strasse (Six Romances; Three Romances)
CD4
From Jewish Folk Poetry, op.79 (1948)
Six Poems by Marina Tsvetayeva, op.143a (1974)
Six Romances, op.140 (1971)
rec. 1995, Philharmonie Köln (From Jewish Folk Poetry), 1994 Studio Stolberger Strasse (Six Poems; Six Romances)
Soloists
Nina Fomina (soprano), Tamara Sinyavskaya (alto), Vladimir Kasatschuck, Arkady Mishenkin (tenors), Anatoly Kotcherga, Anatoly Babykin, Stanislav Sulejmanov (basses)
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