Video of the day: Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
Gramophone
Monday, March 18, 2019
A riveting performance of the Suite from Shostakovich's opera by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and Carlos Miguel Prieto
The Frankfurt Radio Symphony's YouTube channel is well worth exploring for the high production – and musical – values of the live performances.
The most recent live performance features Mexican conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto leading the orchestra in the suite from Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. You can enjoy it below:
Prieto's name may be familiar through the pair of recordings of Rachmaninov's piano concertos that he has (so far) made with Boris Giltburg and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra for Naxos, both of which have been named Editor's Choice recordings in Gramophone.
As Patrick Rucker wrote in his review of the recording of Rachmaninov's Third Concerto last year, 'Boris Giltburg’s new Naxos recording of the D minor Concerto with Carlos Miguel Prieto and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra shatters the encrustation of reputational habit, offering instead a vividly imaginative re-creation of a score that lives and breathes with irresistible vitality. Giltburg’s approach is fundamentally lyrical, rhetorically apt and, aided and abetted by Prieto and the Scots, sensitive to every marking in the score.'