An inspired coupling, this. With one single reservation Haitink's account of Babi Yar is superb, and at 65 minutes (two-and-a-bit LP sides) it fits CD admirably. However, owners of CD machines will need to be patient since the two song-cycles (at present only available on LP and cassette), will appear coupled with the last two symphonies.
It has been becoming clear for some while that Shostakovich turned, for some of his most intense and personal utterances, to a type of melodic idea that is closely linked to certain characteristics of Jewish folk-music. As one would expect, there are elements of this in Babi Yar but the point of contact can be most closely studied in the set of Jewish folk-song arrangements that he wrote in 1948 but could not release for public performance until after the death of Stalin. The mood of these songs, their stoic acceptance of tragedy, their wry humour, their bitter awareness of enforced parting is uncannily close to what we think of as characteristic Shostakovich—if the tunes had not already existed he would have had to write them, you might say.
The Tsvetayeva songs are personal in a more private way (though nothing could be more public in its obvious implications than the angry shout at the end of the fourth song, about the persecution of Pushkin: ''Don't forget! The poet-murderer, Tsar Nicholas the first!''). They include one of Shostakovich's few love songs (and an achingly tender one, of an older woman for a casually encountered younger man), a strikingly characterized (indeed rather Pushkin-like) dialogue between Hamlet and his conscience and a magnificent setting of Tsvetayeva's tribute to Anna Akhmatova that brings tears to one's eyes with its sombre but loving eloquence—again we are very close to the heart of Shostakovich, and it is an engrossing experience to turn back from these songs to the heroically public gesture of the symphony. Both cycles are excellently done, especially the Tsvetayeva set, in which Ortrun Wenkel's voice takes on a vibrantly Russian quality; and she expresses the words as graphically as any native. Don't expect unremitting gloom, though: I defy anyone not to smile at the last of the Jewish songs, in which an old woman lists her simple joys: her husband is a good man, he took her to the theatre last night and (here she positively dances with respectable rapture) ''our sons are doctors!''.
My one reservation about the performance of Babi Yar is that Marius Rintzler, although he has all the necessary blackness and gravity and is in amply sonorous voice, responds to the anger and the irony and the flaming denunciations of Yevtushenko's text with scarcely a trace of the histrionic fervour they cry out for: he is more like a sympathetic but detached observer than an impassioned orator, and he shows little relish for the sound of Russian words. The excellent chorus, though, are very expressive and they make up for a lot, and so does the powerful and sustained drama of Haitink's direction. He has solved the difficult problems of pacing a symphony with three slow movements (one is so gripped throughout that one is scarcely aware that there are such problems) and the atmosphere of each movement is vividly evoked, with a particular care for the subtleties of Shostakovich's orchestration. The orchestral sound, indeed, is magnificent: one can readily believe that the huge forces called for in the score were actually provided, but this does not necessitate any unnatural focusing on (say) the celeste in order that it shall register. The perspective is very natural throughout, and there is an excellent sense of the performance taking place in a believable space. The CD, of course, has rather more impact and clarity than the LPs, but anyone who buys the latter (I have not heard the cassettes) for the sake of the two song-cycles will not be disappointed, I would not, though, have missed the hair-raisingly absorbing experience of hearing Babi Yar uninterrupted, emerging from silence, each movement intensifying the impact of its predecessor.'