Readers have probably noticed that the second half of this month has been relatively quiet. However, where the releases of recordings are concerned, things will definitely pick up with a generous number of new releases one week from today. Five of them are waiting for attention on my queue; and, if things go according to plan, I shall have accounted for all of them prior to their shared release date of January 6. Today I have decided to begin with the least conventional of those offerings.
courtesy of Naxos of America
The title of the album, which, as usual, is available for pre-order from Amazon.com, is Shostakovich: Works Unveiled. The content was provided by French pianist Nicolas Stavy, who has devoted much of his time to uncovering unknown works by Dmitri Shostakovich. Some of these are fragments; and one is an arrangement of the Opus 135 (fourteenth) symphony, which was originally scored for soprano, bass, a small string orchestra, and a large percussion section requiring three players. In this arrangement Stavy alternates between piano and celesta, accompanying soprano Ekaterina Bakanova and bass Alexandros Stavrakakis. The only other performer is a single percussionist, Florent Jodelet.
Shostakovich himself had doubts about calling this piece a symphony. Here is the relevant paragraph from his Wikipedia page:
The composer himself was initially unsure what to call the work, eventually designating it a symphony rather than a song cycle to emphasise the unity of the work musically and philosophically: most of the poems deal with the subject of mortality (he rejected the title oratorio because the work lacks a chorus; it is not a choral symphony for the same reason).
Personally, I would have gone with “song cycle.” Shostakovich’s biographer, Brian Morton, viewed Opus 135 as a creative response to the song cycle that Modest Mussorgsky had entitled Songs and Dances of Death, for which Shostakovich had prepared an orchestral version.
Death is clearly the theme that pervades the eleven poems that Shostakovich set. He drew upon four poets to make his selections: Federico García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Küchelbecker and Rainer Maria Rilke. All of those texts were translated into Russian. The booklet for Works Unveiled presents both those Russian texts and English translations. However, I have to confess that negotiating the Russian alphabet continues to be relatively difficult; and this often results in difficulties in negotiating the semantic intent behind the vocalists’ utterances. I find that this is as much a handicap in listening to the quartet arrangement as in experiencing the score as it was originally written.
Negotiating Stavy’s solo piano performances tends to be more satisfying. These account for four tracks, all less than two and one-half minutes in duration. Nevertheless, all four of these brief gestures were engaging as complete compositions, each in its own right. My only quibble is with Elizabeth Wilson, author of the booklet notes, who seems to have overlooked the possibility that theme for “Funeral March in Memory of Victims of the Revolution” amounts to a reflection of a similar theme composed by Ludwig van Beethoven for the third movement of his Opus 26 (twelfth) piano sonata in A-flat major.
The remaining tracks on the album are fragments. The first of these is an unfinished Moderato con moto movement for a sonata for violin (Sueye Park) and piano. The other is a four-hand performance of what is roughly the first eight minutes of the opening movement of Gustav Mahler’s tenth symphony. Cédric Tiberghien shares the keyboard with Stavy for that performance. I can appreciate why this latter offering is a fragment. It is hard to imagine this climax of that movement being performed by any ensemble other than a full orchestra.
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