Rather than commemorate the 25th anniversary of the death of Shostakovich with a newly minted, squeaky-clean cycle of symphonies or string quartets, Le Chant du Monde has raided Czech and Russian archives to present the great Russian composer in authentic style, warts and all. There are 15 discs in the series, nicely packaged with rare cover photos. Seven of the symphonies are represented, all but one in compelling live performances by legendary artists who knew Shostakovich. Transfers are surprisingly low-fi, since little attempt has been made to mask flaws in the original Czech Radio tapes. The drawback of primitive sound quality – only Nos 4, 5 and 9 are in stereo – is offset by the spacious acoustic of the Prague venue. The real problem, particularly evident in Nos 5 and 10, is the way the levels are faded every time a climax starts to build. The 10th also loses its first note.
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky’s magnificent interpretation of the Fourth will be well known to die-hard collectors. His 1981 relay with Bolshoi Theatre forces used to be available on Russian Disc (1/94 – nla) and his 1985 studio recording with the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra recently resurfaced on a Melodiya twofer. Rozhdestvensky takes a quite different tack from the original Soviet exponent of this music, Kyrill Kondrashin. Like Mravinsky in the pieces with which he was closely identified, Kondrashin seeks to thrust aside potential opposition with an injection of manic energy. Rozhdestvensky gives himself much more space, using the abrasive qualities of a less-than-first-rate band to point up the violence and unpredictability of the idiom. The central scherzo is more ironic than ever, the finale more spacious and wayward than you might have thought possible. And yet it holds together, despite (or even because of?) a sometimes alarming preoccupation with comic stylisation. In this sense, Shostakovich’s absurd Scarlatti arrangements actually work well as a makeweight. There are many ways of reading the main work, not all of them political. The Mahler of the Sixth and Seventh looms inescapably large, and the resort to archetype and repetition can seem like a surrealist commentary on the futility of creation. Or of life itself. Perhaps it is the sheer boredom of existence in the Soviet Union that lies behind some of Rozhdestvensky’s bolder characterisations. The final peroration is preposterous and anti-heroic enough to admit any interpretation bar a positive one. One or other Rozhdestvensky recording is an essential purchase, a real challenge to the blandness of contemporary Western sensibilities. Unfortunately, Le Chant du Monde leaves in the applause, which does rather break the spell of the desolate if not entirely hopeless epilogue.
The inclusion of a Czech Philharmonic performance of the Ninth is something of a puzzle. Kosler chooses some distinctively slow tempos, but there is never quite enough weight of sonority to make them tell. Much more tempting are the Evgeny Mravinsky concert relays, although most are not new, having appeared in the livery of Praga’s Evgeny Mravinsky in Prague series (4/00). (It’s a far cry from the time when the greatness of his Leningrad Philharmonic had to be taken on trust, such was the paucity of its representation on disc.) No one has ever brought off the problematic 11th and 12th with quite Mravinsky’s degree of conviction – he premiered Symphonies Nos 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 and gave first Leningrad performances of many of the rest – but his interpretations did stiffen in old age, and even this account of the Fifth Symphony is a mite disappointing. The 10th is worth considering, notwithstanding the problems mentioned above. The scherzo is breathtakingly fast, the finale a further tour de force of orchestral virtuosity. More surprising is the degree of flexibility and subjective moulding in the performance. One expects this conductor to push forward, but here he ambushes the orchestra by going off in quite the other direction; there is a fair amount of unexpected broadening in the approach to the central climax of the first movement and some wonderfully contentious bits of phrasing. As elsewhere, steer clear if raw sonorities and white-hot expressivity are not your thing. But if that’s the case, you probably won’t have read this far.'