As you can see, this cycle was built up over a period
of eight years. A review elsewhere of no. 7 (the discs are also coming
out separately on the Regis label) states that they are live recordings.
The documentation here says nothing to that effect and they certainly
sound like studio recordings, clear but with the reverberation typical
of a large empty hall. The same sound engineer, Siegfried Spittler,
is named all through, and for most of the time the producer is Christoph
Held, joined by Reiner (or Heiner, the covers can’t make up their minds)
Müller-Adolphi in nos. 7 and 8 and replaced by Hans-Martin Höpner
in the last recordings (13 and 14). The results are consistently impressive,
big and shattering in the climaxes without losing focus in the quieter
sections.
This set marks a departure from the usual Brilliant
Classics trend. Rather than 11 jewel-cases flimsily held together by
a strip of cardboard we get a sturdy box, containing the 11 CDs each
in a smart envelope of its own [Editor’s Note: increasingly Brilliant
are offering purchasers both options] and, glory of glory, a booklet,
in English, which gives a profile of the conductor and a well-argued
essay on each symphony by David Doughty. We don’t get the texts for
nos. 13 and 14 but at least we have a summary of each poem. In the case
of no. 2 and 3 it’s probably better not to know what they are singing
about. Even the layout has the indefinable air of a quality product,
with its uncompromising insistence on chronological order even when
this results in some short playing times (nos. 12 and 15 could have
gone together, for example, but why worry at this price?).
Doughty is commendably honest in his presentation;
he does not attempt to deny that, alongside a few towering masterpieces,
this cycle contains a lot of messy and sheerly uninspired music. He
also states the pre- and post-"Testimony" views on some of
the works without necessarily coming down on one side or another. This
is all the more welcome as the accompaniment to a cycle by a conductor
who, we are told (and the results bear this out), brings out "the
meaning of a composition purely on the basis of the score. Barshai needs
no additional ingredients to make a piece ‘interesting’; he shows what
the music itself has to say". In the case of no. 5 - our perceptions
of which have changed totally since "Testimony", affecting
in particular the manner in which the finale is to be played - Barshai
unleashes from the score the most numbing evidence possible in favour
of the "Testimony" interpretation. By the end of the finale
all remaining attempts at humanity or beauty have been mercilessly smashed
aside – the perfect musical counterpart of the odious O’Brien’s words
in Orwell’s 1984: "if you want an image of the future, think of
a boot stamping on a child’s face". And, while I don’t doubt that
Barshai found his evidence in the score, he was also in the know. He
worked professionally and as a friend with Shostakovich from the 1940s
till the composer’s death and stated in a 1983 BBC radio interview that
"Testimony" was "all true". I have started here
because, if in the last resort I find these sturdy, powerful readings
don’t quite engage me as the best of Mravinsky or Kondrashin can, I
would like to emphasise that there is at least one absolutely enthralling
performance in the set.
When the first wave of Soviet musicians were allowed
to tour the Western world in the 1960s, audiences found in Rudolf Barshai,
then known principally as a great viola-player and as the founder-conductor
of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, a musician not quite corresponding
to the penny-in-the-slot image of a Russian dynamo, all brilliance,
savagery and seething tension. (But audiences acquainted with the art
of Nikolai Malko should have known better than to typecast Russian musicians).
Barshai proved that a Russian could be perfectly idiomatic in Mozart
and Beethoven. After his move to the west in 1976 Barshai has won a
lot of respect without ever quite making it to the top. The booklet
profile, taking up a comment by Shostakovich about Barshai’s "Eroica",
states that his "music-making could most easily be compared to
Klemperer’s".
Easily said, when Klemperer recordings of Shostakovich
are not exactly two-a-penny. But wait, there is one, so let’s
examine the two conductors in Shostakovich’s 9th Symphony.
Klemperer’s 1955 Turin performance of this work used to be available
on a Cetra LP and is occasionally re-broadcast by the RAI; we may hope
that one day a re-mastering of the original tapes will produce a less
scrawny sound than that of the off-the-air tape I am working from. At
the outset Klemperer is so much slower than Barshai that it seems ridiculous,
but then you realise that he is thoroughly enjoying the droll humour
of it all, and he gets bouncier rhythms and cheekier phrasing. It sounds
closer to Kurt Weill’s pre-war Berlin than to post-war Shostakovich,
but it has character and I’m afraid Barshai’s neat reading sounds merely
bland in comparison. Klemperer also gets a weird mixture of beauty and
sleaze out of the second movement and in the third movement, where he
is scarcely slower than Barshai, the players sound possessed
where Barshai’s are no more than spick and span. By this time Klemperer
has the Turiners absolutely under his thumb. The brass in the fourth
movement blow raspberries in a way Barshai does not even attempt and
the Turin bassoonist is momentarily transformed into the greatest bassoonist
in the world as Klemperer coaxes a saxophone-like whine and some bilious
rubato from him. And in the finale Klemperer, at a faster tempo
than Barshai, again revels in the cheekiness of the music.
So please, a warning to over-zealous fans of present
day musicians: don’t make comparisons that risk blowing up in your face!
Barshai is a very fine conductor but a great conductor is another thing
and Klemperer, even in music for which he presumably had only a passing
interest, was unmistakably that.
But back to Barshai and in many ways I feel he is to
be appreciated in Shostakovich for the same reasons as Berglund is to
be appreciated in Sibelius. He has a way of letting the sound well out
of the orchestra rather than forcing it out and his tempi seem to set
up a momentum of their own. You do not feel the conductor whipping up
the allegros, Solti-fashion, indeed, in a way you hardly feel an interpreter
at all, a tribute to the scrupulous preparation, both as regards articulation
and colour, which enables the actual performances to blossom with complete
naturalness. If this sounds unexciting, then listen to the first movement
of no. 4 which builds up to a colossal climax. If in many ways he seems
an unusually westernised Russian, he has his winds screaming and his
brass braying in the best of Mravinskian traditions. Indeed, it is often
the faster, noisier movements which benefit from Barshai’s approach.
Just by taking it at face value, he makes no. 2 stand up better than
it often does and in no. 12 he makes you think, up to at least the half-way
mark, that this work’s insistence on just two themes repeated in every
movement might actually be a matter of thematic discipline rather than
utter poverty of invention. On the other hand, a more interventionist
approach (such as Bernstein’s) is needed if the arid wastes of no. 7
are to yield a minimum of music. A tendency for slow movements to lack
tension perhaps explains why nos. 8 and 10, though strongly played,
are not completely overwhelming, and in no. 11 Barshai seems engaged
only by the third movement (by far the best). He is fully effective
in the last three, Shostakovich’s return to symphonic health. Barshai
was the original interpreter of no. 14 and recorded it almost immediately.
He is still master of its enigmatic textures and here and in no. 13
he has the benefit of secure and expressive soloists.
A sturdy, truthful set, then, which in some ways combines
the Russian and Western approaches to this composer. And which has a
great no. 5.
Christopher Howell
see also detailed review by David
Billing and Paul
Serotsky
WDR Radio Chorus (2, 3),
Choral Academy Moscow (13), Sergei Aleksashkin (bass) (13), Alla Simoni
(soprano) (14), Vladimir Vaneev (bass) (14), WDR Symphony Orchestra, Cologne
conducted by Rudolf Barshai