Nine is a lucky number here in Thailand, but was less so for some of the great European composers. The story goes that Gustav Mahler, a superstitious man, was especially spooked by the number nine. Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorak, and Bruckner all died after competing their 9th symphonies. To sidestep the same fate, when Mahler began to write his 9th Symphony, (Das Lied Von Der Erde) he labelled it his 10th.
Shostakovich: Symphony No 14, Op 135. Gal James (soprano), Alexander Vinogradov (baritone), Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko. A Naxos CD or download.
The dodge didn’t work and Mahler died while he was working on his 10th (or 11th, depending on perspective); leaving only two finished movements and outlines for three more. Since his demise, composers and musical scholars have been attempting to complete it ever since.
Shostakovich, a fervent Mahler admirer, had no problem with the number nine, but was just as haunted as the Austrian composer was by the fear of death, especially during his later years. Artists have always been able to transmute dread, including politically-inspired dread, into great art, and the last century gave them plenty of opportunity to do so. Shostakovich, who saw himself in Stalin’s crosshairs, had a genius for it. His 14th Symphony, like Mahler’s Das Lied Von Der Erde, is a song cycle with orchestra, with the strong presence of death at its centre.
Mahler, taking his texts from classical Chinese poetry, celebrates the world in all of its beauty and concludes with a song of farewell that is overwhelmingly moving in its expression of combined ecstasy and resignation. Shostakovich’s symphonic cycle surveys much darker territory, full of fear, bitterness, and protest against the inevitability and finality of death. He sets Russian translations of poems by Lorca, Apollinaire, Rilke, and Küchelbecker, to music that is matched only by his later quartets (especially the 13th) and his viola sonata in its black intensity.
The 14th Symphony is scored for two vocal soloists — a soprano and a bass — and a chamber orchestra of strings and percussion instruments, enough of them to require four players. Listeners who are drawn to this piece have probably, at some time or another, heard the pioneering Rudolf Barshai version, released by EMI around 1970 and, especially, Rostropovich’s classic account with Galina Vishnevskaya and Mark Reshetin, one of the most powerful of all recordings of Shostakovich’s music (the composer himself said it was an exact realisation of what was in his mind when he composed the work), once available as a CBS LP and later as a hard-to-obtain Melodiya CD.
It is high praise for this new version to say that even those who know the Rostropovich/Vishnevskay/Reshetin recording well will not miss it while listening to Petrenko and his forces. As soon as the first song, a setting of Lorca’s De Profundis, begins it is clear that Alexander Vinogradov yields little to the great Reshetin. The packaging identifies him as a baritone, but his tone here is a rich and resonant bass. The poem mourns hundreds of lovers, their once fiery emotions now extinguished, sleeping underground in the Andalusian earth. The music paints the scene in the darkest colours, the bass soloists accompanied by low string sonorities that sometimes swoop and slide, suggesting sighs. Shostakovich was certainly thinking of lovers who were political victims and friends of his, sleeping too soon under the Russian earth, and his grief for them saturates the music.
The one things I miss listening to him is the sense of tears in his voice as the music surges at the words “Zdes’ im kresty postavyat/Chtob ikh Nye zabyli lyudi” (They place crosses here/So that people will not forget them). This — placing a memorial — is what Shostakovich is doing with his symphony, and the intensity of the line does not register quite as wrenchingly here as it does when sung by older artists like Reshetin and Barshai’s Yevgeni Vladimirov who certainly had personal memories of the political era that haunts the symphony. Still, a deeply satisfying account.
Shostakovich brings out all of the fright and menace of the Malagueña that follows, another Lorca setting of a poem in which death stalks in and out of a tavern where “black horses and sinister people wander in the deep paths of the guitar”. The soprano almost cries out the verses as the string orchestra, in a frantic, high-speed malaguena rhythm, surges and lunges around her. James is terrific here, not as close to hysteria as Vishnevskaya but obviously possessed by the music and easier on the ears (although the Russian singer’s rawness is appropriate to this music).
As the symphony progresses, each singer responds eloquently to the shifting states of mind, from the deep mood of grief and regret in the setting of Apollinaire’s The Suicide, where James’ repeated keening of “tri lilii” (the three lilies on the suicide’s grave) seem to reach the farthest depths of sorrow and regret, while her rapt, transfixed projection of the passage in Apollinaire’s Lorelei, where the enchantress Lorelei, whose eyes drive men to death, sees the boat carrying her lover approaching on the Rhine, is ravishingly sung here. Her Russian is perfect, although there is nothing in the little biography provided with the liner notes to indicate a Russian background.
Vinogradov is just as sensitive to the emotional depths of the songs for bass, passages that must have come straight from the composer’s heart. Listen to his interpretation of the lines, toward the end of the setting of Apollinaire’s At The Santé Prison where the prisoner begs love not to allow despair (the Russian uses the term for a crown of thorns) to overwhelm his mind, and if he doesn’t spit out the obscene curses in Reply Of The Zaparogue Cossacks To The Sultan Of Constantinople quite as ferociously as some earlier interpreters have, he certainly gets the point across.
Petrenko and his fellow musicians allow the 11 highly varied songs that make up the work to flow naturally so that they fuse to form the symphony that Shostakovich intended. Shostakovich often uses the percussion instruments to create sound effects — galloping horses, tolling funeral bells, xylophones suggesting bones, etc. Petrenko is careful to keep these sounds from ever taking on any cartoony blatantness. Throughout the piece, the composer punctuates the music with percussion sounds in groups of two or three — the two whip cracks at the end of Malagueña, the two bell tolls in Lorelei, and many others. Perhaps they had some special meaning for Shostakovich, and Petrenko makes sure that you notice them without spotlighting them unduly.
Naxos’ recorded sound is spacious and realistic, with perspectives accurate. You notice this immediately listening to the recording side-by-side with Barshai, Rostropovich’s Melodiya recording, or Haitink.
One complaint. I don’t know the texts in their original languages, but the translations from the Russian versions here leave a lot to be desired. It may be that they are closer to the originals than the Russian, but Shostakovich worked from the Russian texts and in some cases the words are so thoroughly rearranged that following them with the music can be misleading.
Still, an essential purchase or download for anyone interested in Shostakovich.
Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich poses during a recording session for the French record label Pathe Marconi, in Paris, on May 23, 1958.
