Composer: Dmitri Shostakovich
Orchestra: Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Bernard Haitink
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: CSO Resound
Catalogue: CSOR901814
Release: 2008
Size: 257 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Op. 43
01. I. Allegretto poco moderato – Presto
02. II. Moderato con moto
03. III. Largo – Allegro
Accompanying the audio CD is a DVD of one of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s critically acclaimed Beyond the Score performances featuring a multimedia Shostakovich documentary led by creative director Gerard McBurney.The programme features newsreels and testimonies, including the words of Shostakovich and his friends. Beyond the Score brings to life not only the music, but also the social and political world from which it emerged.
A champion of Shostakovich’s music, CSO Principal Conductor Bernard Haitink leads the Fourth Symphony, a dark and emotionally, groundbreaking work. It lay dormant, unperformed, for 25 years after its completion but now this stunning symphony is recognised as one of the composer’s boldest and most brilliant scores.
The last of Dmitry Shostakovich’s youthful, experimental symphonies, the Symphony No. 4 (1935-1936) marked a critical turning point, for its modernist tendencies provoked a hostile article in Pravda, thought to have been written by Stalin himself to intimidate the composer. Because of this rebuke, the symphony was withdrawn from performance and not played again until 1961, so due to its comparatively late absorption in the repertoire, it is one of the least played of Shostakovich’s symphonies. Yet this is one of his most gripping scores, full of volatile expressions and memorable ideas, and its expansive form, caustic themes, complex developments, and wide emotional range make it comparable in many ways to the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, on which it was partly modeled. Bernard Haitink and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra present this masterpiece in the CSO Resound line, and the results are breathtaking in this transparent audiophile recording. Haitink’s long career of conducting Shostakovich puts him among the most authoritative interpreters, and he leads the orchestra with assurance through the work’s mercurial moods and carefully guides it through treacherous technical difficulties, perhaps most impressively in the fugal flurries of the first movement’s Presto section. The sound throughout is detailed, yet also spacious, so listeners have all the advantages of one without losing the other, and the crisp lines stand out all the more because of the depth of the reproduction. The symphony is paired with a bonus DVD, which features a documentary on Shostakovich, Is Music Dangerous?, with narrator Gerard McBurney and actor Nicholas Rudall, and excerpts from the CSO’s performance of the Symphony No. 4.