Funny you should mention this, Richard, since I have been quietly collecting my thoughts on the rest of the Fourth (and revisiting the Second) in the odd moments that I have, which has led me to becoming increasingly convinced that the key to the Fourth lies in the rejected sketch (which I think I'm right in believing may now be in your possession....) That opening viola phrase of two rising fourths, the second a semitone higher than the first, is absent from the finished symphony yet seems to haunt it everywhere; intervals of perfect and augmented fourths as well as semitones form the basis of so much of the piece; indeed the very first phrase of the second movement implies a fourth within its inverted triad.

Well, as I've just said over in the other thread, I'm a recent convert. More specifically, although I'd heard with interest a couple of the symphonies (nos. 10 and 11, to be precise) in the previous couple of years, I'd got incredibly resistant to the idea of Shostakovich. I didn't really have a 'conversion' moment while listening (in fact, I still have a lot to get to know), but in the course of trying to explain to someone just before Christmas exactly why I hated Shostakovich so much I suddenly lost all conviction in my own position. I literally felt the scales dropping from my eyes (well, not literally literally, but you know what I mean), and so the time is now ripe, I feel, for a time_is_now Shostakovich odyssey.

I have Britten's live recording of the 14th symphony, which seems to be generally highly-regarded, and I'm inclined to buy Lazarev's recording of the 11th with the RSNO, since I heard him conduct that work amazingly with the CBSO last year. I'm also wondering if I should get the Brilliant box (Kondrashin?) of the complete cycle. I don't know Symphony No 15 at all, which is being extensively discussed on the other thread. I also don't know No 4, which Richard seems to think is important. Can anyone recommend recordings of these two?

Richard and I agree to disagree over the Jansons, which to my ears is fatally compressed in dynamic range in some symphonies, so that 4 for example loses all it sense of the wild and extreme. I'd certainly agree with r that 4 is the cornerstone of the whole cycle, and that is why I'd steer clear of that entire set. On the other hand, I quite enjoy the Barshai...

If you can't find the Aulos box, which does seem to come and go on the pages of eBay, then the new Melodiya remastering of a?/the? Kondrashin cycle (at the moment there seems to be some doubt whether all the recordings are identical to those on the Aulos set) would probably be the best bet: if you're going to be making regular trips into the world of Shostakovich, Kondrashin would still be the best all-round guide. If you buy any other cycle and become in the slightest involved with the music, then you'll be buying it sooner or later anyway.

http://www.mdt.co.uk/MDTSite/product//MELCD1001065.htm

Individually, you're presented with a deal more choice. Mravinsky's recordings are even closer to the bone than Kondrashin's - where they exist; he never recorded a complete cycle. Rozhdestvensky did, and although the sound balance bears the unmistakeable marks of engineers playing with a new multi-mike toybox, it has more of a sense of scale than the Jansons. There's a Rostropovich cycle due for reissue, too, though it's a tad more hit-and-miss: his live recordings are always worth a listen, however. In general I'd avoid non-Russian conductors in the repertoire, though there are some honourable exceptions; Karel Ancerl and Herbert Kegel both lived in communist Eastern Europe, and understand the music's implications well enough.... I'll not go on now, though I'm sure when the thread settles down we'll come back to individual interpretations.

Ooh yes please. Is this something I missed on the old boards (where admittedly I may have been too benighted to open any Shostakovich thread that had presented itself)?

How did I miss that??

 

Original Posting on the Second:

2

Observations; No.1 (op.10) was a graduation work, so the young DSCH was all but bound to stay within certain limits; No.2 (op. 14) is only a year or so down the line, but to a commission from the State for the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. This was before the restrictive Stalinist policy for the Arts existed; the cultural buzz-word of the time was 'futurism'. So the young composer was handed a guaranteed performance with large forces at a time before experimentation was ruthlessly quashed; he had already shown his prowess within the confines of a diploma work, now he could show exactly what he could do. Perhaps he became a little carried away...

The opening is arresting, but there are sections which begin as recognisable DSCH archetypes but are pushed to the level of empty virtuosity; one fugato section all but collapses under the weight of so many close entries, and there is one disconcerting theme which is unmistakeably the beginning of "We'll meet again" over a decade before it was composed. On the Elder recording the choral writing sounds very idiomatic (though his siren is nowhere near as good as Barshai) and the work appears to be proceeding towards its close in Mahlerian splendour when a side drum ushers in the last lines of the poem, all but shouted before the slithering scales of the opening return to resolve on a final major chord. A strange piece indeed, definitely not for the first-timer, as V. so accurately pointed out. It seems to be cobbled together from completely different pieces, there is no obvious form except the singing and non-singing parts and there is clever writing apparently for the sake of it. Vitually every criticism Syd has ever levelled at Shostakovich could be justifiably applied to parts of his second symphony, but it has more than a few maddening moments (particularly in the choral sequence) which are stunningly good. I came to it expecting the worst, and leave it knowing I shall return - so long as it's not to the Barshai version.

4 i

There has been quite a break between my notes on the first three Shostakovich symphonies and those on the fourth for several reasons, not least of which is the scale of the piece and the time needed to get to grips with it.

It’s an epic journey. From the bristling shrieks of the opening to the extinguishing of the celesta’s dying glimmer takes well over an hour and requires a huge orchestra with six each of flutes and clarinets as well as eight horns, two tubas and two sets of timpani amongst the departures from standard symphonic practice. It has a strange shape too: just three movements, the outer two of which each run close to half an hour in length (more than many symphonies altogether) separated by a Scherzo which is not far under ten minutes.

We started by using the very inexpensive Barshai set as a reference, and the notes for this disc suggest that the first movement is a free form where ideas come and go, many never to be heard again. I think I can disprove this; the fairly intensive listening I’ve been involved in over the past two weeks has given me plenty of material to work with. I intend to take us on a journey through this movement: the timings I'll give are now based on the Kondrashin Aulos remastering,which tends towards the shortest timings, but none of the others I’ve been using is very different; it should prove possible to navigate through any performance with a little flexibility; I also used the Previn/Chicago on EMI, Sinaisky from BBC Music Mag, Rozhdestvensky on Olympia and the recent Saraste broadcast for my original analysis (joined since by Kondrashin (commercial and live) Rostropovich (ditto), Kegel (live), Jansons, Chung and Rattle; I also have an excellent new edition of the score from Russia.


Just for starters, don’t expect standard symphonic form here; as I’ve suggested on another thread, the symphonies might be likened to Shakespearean plays in their sweep of emotional drama; No. 4 particularly inhabits a nightmarish world where tiny ideas suddenly take on a deep significance and normal logic hardly applies: at times the drama is as immense and intense as an epic movie, moments later the texture can be as delicate as chamber music. We see things from many perspectives, there are dislocations like strange edits in a film; but perhaps this should not be unexpected in a symphony by a man who had cut his performing teeth in the cinema pit.


One of the biggest tricks in any narrative art form be it literature, drama or music is to grab the audience from the start; just think of Beethoven’s fifth symphony for example. Shostakovich’s fourth starts in a very arresting fashion, with a sense of bristling anguish; a descending phrase of three decorated notes on high strings, woodwinds and xylophone over a thrice repeated discord with suspended cymbal clash which kicks in a beat later, followed by an angular little phrase on the winds and xylophone which leads into the first theme proper, a rather garrulous march.

This introduction takes about sixteen seconds*, but is worth noting, because it contains material which will be come part of the movement’s fabric; the three repeated chords, the three descending notes and the angular phrase (particularly its first main interval of a fourth) will all reappear in various guises throughout the movement; indeed the repeated chords speeded up begin the foursquare accompaniment to the march, starting a regular motoric beat which will provide much of the momentum for the whole movement.

This march theme might seem rather trite and commonplace on first hearing, but there is much more to it than immediately meets the ear. It falls into two sections. The first is for the brass; at the end of the first phrase (00:22)[Bar 8] there is a triplet plus three note rhythm (diddlely dum dum dum) heard twice, once with the interval of a fourth down, the second time with an augmented fourth up up; this ‘cell’ or pattern of notes which will play an important part over the next 26 minutes or so, as will other phrases, particularly two versions of a rising scale. At the end of this first section there’s a strange moment of repeat (00:45)[Bars 15 & 16] as if an LP has become stuck before a rising scale takes us to the second section; the first phrase of which (00:51)[Bar 18] is actually the three notes plus angular phrase from the introduction, the second (01:01)[midway through Bar 21] is a string variant of the diddleleee section, but taken only as far as the third note then held as the repeated note becomes ever more forceful in the winds, and the third (01:10)[end of Bar 24] turns the idea on its head by putting the theme in the bass against the accompaniment of the continuing insistent note on high winds leading to a climax (01:22)[Bar 29] where the horns hold the note whilst strings and brass echo descending and rising scales from the march simultaneously. At the end of this (01:30)[Bar 32] are three short stabbing chords, the three from under from the introduction, but now higher, shorter and faster, leading via a phrase from the march to a development section (01:36)[end of Bar 33].

This begins on the strings with the interval of a fourth again prominent, is handed to oboes (later plus bassoon) before returning to the strings; the single repeated note continues to propel the music, though the time signatures in this section change frequently, often after a single bar or two. Just after the two minute point (02:03)[end of Bar 46], a new theme appears on the strings: the motoric repeated notes start to turn legato on the cellos but the sense of rhythm remains ambiguous; by 02:42[Bar 75] the time is becoming more biased towards triple time rather than a march and two of the three stab chords, now softened into pizzicato make an appearance at 02:47 [Bar 78], heralding a hand-over to the woodwinds, with three more pizzicato stabs at 02:51 [Bars 82-4] though the strings take over again soon and the violin phrase at 03:19 [Bars 106-9]will take on a greater importance later. At 03:25 [Bar 109] the piccolo clarinet makes a strident appearance, and the texture starts to thicken; the stab chords now arrive irregularly, sometimes in threes, at other times singly.

At 03:49 [Bar 128] a new snappy dotted rhythm arrives, though the trumpets return to a diddle de dee version of the single note briefly. The texture becomes thicker as more voices enter with versions of the first phrase of the string’s theme, each determined to have its say with no regard for what anyone else may be doing, whilst the xylophone and winds cling on to the reiterated single note idea, but being forced ever upwards by the mounting pressure underneath until they reach a safe plateau from which to shriek a modification of the 'stab' chord like a siren warning seven times before joining the upper strings in bristling trills over the contrapuntal mayhem underneath, for at 04:27 [Bar 164]the lower brass muscle in with what appears to be a completely different tempo to everybody else but is actually just slow triplets, to particularly disorienting effect; at around 04:43 [Bar 176], a raucous version of the march has started to re-emerge through the texture with statements of fourths on the trumpets very prominent, and incidentally including what suggests to me a brief precursor of the first movement of the Leningrad Symphony's repetitious theme at 04:41[Bar 183].

At 05:01[Bar 190] this pent-up pressure is released in an implied triple-time sequence of descending fourths over the repeated note, horns have a dotted version of the one note pattern and the three stabbing chords reappear. Tension winds down further as these yield to the one note beat pattern which drops by octaves through the horns to the timpani.

(05:23)[Bar 207] At this point the composer plays another unsettling trick with the tempo, for although the timpani continue with the solid beat, the woodwind line that now appears above it is in triplets, as if in attempt to hurry the music on; the three stabbing chords appear again, though this time they’re placed singly as punctuation at the end of woodwind phrases; the shrill piccolo clarinet returns again as the winds lose the battle for a faster tempo and a dotted version of the one note rhythm takes over; the rising scales from the march are much in evidence.

At 06:45[Bar 249] the strings pick up a version of their theme in unison rather like a religious cantilation or chant becoming rapidly more agitated until it is completely crushed by a vicious outburst from the whole orchestra (07:06)[Bar 255]: prominent in the texture are the timpani and horns with a recurring interval of a fourth.

When the air clears we are in a different landscape; the one note has now become a limping pattern based around a minor third in the bass, whilst a bassoon at 07:21[Bar 263] begins a new theme (though the first phrase with its rise of a fourth is developed from the violins' phrase at 03:19) a slow pensive melody with very sparse accompaniment. At 07:51[Bar 284] the harp plays six gently rocking chords: these are yet another version of the triplets from the opening march. The theme is varied by the violas and cellos in octaves (07:55)[Bar 287] and then fills out into a long limbed adagietto section for all the strings: take note of the little climactic phrase at 08:24[Bar 307] not long before the rocking harp chords repeat.

At 09:12[Bar 335] the bassoon theme reappears on a bass clarinet; this time the harp is beginning to insinuate the repeated note which was such an important feature earlier; something suspiciously akin to Mahlerian birdsong crossed with the single repeated note appears on a flute (yet again a fourth is prominent). Two of the stabbing chords make a soft appearance at 09:35[Bar 361] heralding a little lugubrious muted waltz for the strings before the celesta has a matter-of-fact repeat of the harp’s rocking chords.

At 10:02[Bar 372] the bassoon’s theme is taken up by a horn, whilst the Mahlerian bird call of a fourth appears twice on the clarinet, and once on the harp in the bass in between. Material from earlier in the movement starts to sidle onto the scene; at 10:33 [Bar 393] the brass patter out the triplet plus one pattern three times and the winds replay the angular phrase from the opening (10:39)[Bar 397] before the triplet pattern appears again; although the low strings try to smooth things over everything is being dragged back inexorably to the march, a trumpet states a version of the bassoon theme (11:12)[Bar 422] over a series of anguished chords derived from the three chords at the very start leading to a huge climax where the strings’ phrase from 08:24 meets the rising scale figures from the march head on (11:31)[Bar 436].

At this point (11:48)[Bar 447] a grotesque parody of the bassoon theme with the Mahlerian birdsong comes back like a haunting nightmare: the two tubas, reinforced by the contra-bassoon snarl the bassoon's pensive theme lumpily whilst the birdsong is yelped and brayed by high strings, xylophone, woodwinds and trombones before the trombones too have a go at the bassoon theme (12:05)[Bar 460] with the trumpets over them recalling a different part of the same theme. This comes to an abrupt halt at 12:28[Bar 477], about halfway through the movement.

What happens next is pure burlesque: although there is a scherzo movement proper in the symphony, each of the two long outer movements also has a scherzo section. In the first movement this starts off like a circus or fairground tune on the woodwinds, and is quite clearly derived from the march theme at the beginning, though the bass line at 12:54[Bar 497] is just as obviously founded on the bassoon theme; the jaunty little mixture of these two themes continues after an interjection of a memory of the 'stab' chords twice plus the triplets at 13:18[Bar 510] with the strings providing a pizzicato memory of the repeated note and upward scale. At 13:41[Bar 540] there is a new syncopated version of the triplet pattern, and again there is a contrapuntal building of texture towards a rising scale flutter-tongued trumpet phrase (14:10)[Bar 569] and a series of five rising repeated chords.

At 14:22[Bar 580] a frantic scurrying fugue erupts on the strings, but yet again it’s based on previous material, in this case a very telescoped version of part of the string theme first heard two minutes in; more and more voices are added until the percussion joins (16:01) [Bar 716] to build towards another huge galloping climax made all the more furious by the overlaying of slow trumpet triplets against the main beat (16:17)[Bar 737].(These are for some strange reason completely inaudible in the Kondrashin recording, incidentally)

At 16:28[Bar 755] the pressure has built to its maximum and the bristling anguished chords from the introduction come screaming in; their arrival effectively derails the train of progress and the music breaks up into memories of the movement’s component parts before swerving into a sarcastic triple time romp for the strings based at first on elements of the march, although at 17:16[Bar 812] reclaiming the theme which the bassoon had lifted from them and recasting it as a waltz. There is another abrupt and ominous change of mood at 17:26[Bar 853] with long flutter-tongued high winds over a muted memory of the bassoon theme in the bass and mysterious cluster chords for the higher strings.

(18:35)[Bar 882] Out of nowhere, a succession of drum rolls with growing discords lumber out across the scene, increasing in intensity as if the last climax has somehow managed to rerail itself and is steadily regathering its power. There is a short cantilation for the winds, then the three note descending wind phrase from the introduction wails in with discordant struggling rising scales ending in triplets underneath; a cymbal crash (19:45)[Bar 912] and the angular phrase from the opening and we seem headed for a recapitulation of the march, and indeed the accompaniment begins. What we hear on top however, is not the march theme at all, instead the brass are doggedly intoning the bassoon’s melody with the high winds keening over the top of them: an unsustainable anticlimax which soon peters out.

At 20:41[Bar 937] a cor anglais begins a solo which quotes the string’s version of the bassoon theme from 07:55 and leads to a memory of the climactic phrase from the early string theme first heard at 03:19 (21:26)[Bar 965] and the fourth-laden Mahlerian bird song, now on a solo violin, which takes over the solo musing and leads via a quick sad snatch of waltz (21:52)[Bar 977] back to a elegiac four beat rhythm (triplets again at 22:36[Bar 996]), as if the movement is drawing to a close.

But at 23:18[Bar 1006] the proper march theme softly returns, this time on a solo bassoon, presumably as some form of recompense for losing his melody to the brass on its previous appearance. He is joined by the other bassoons and a contra bassoon (another of the exceptional orchestral requirements) and together they chug through the march unperturbed even by an ominous low semitone cluster on horns (23:59)[Bar 1017]; they are joined by the cor anglais (24:16)[Bar 1023] harking back to the repeated motoric note, the triplet pattern and finally the birdsong interval of a fourth as the atmosphere turns darker with sinking soft low brass chords and gong underpinning the mood.

The three cries of anguish from the opening try to reassert themselves; the first (24:51)[Bar 1033] preceded by a tiny fragment of march bursts into a brief chromatic flare like a match in the the dark, the other two fail to ignite, leaving just a single oboe note hanging in the dark over the low brass as the cor anglais utters its last forlorn falling fourth.

An unsettling inconclusive ending, but there are still two movements to go...


* As mentioned previously, timings are now based on the Kondrashin recording available as part of the Aulos set. Bar numbers are in blue.