Composer: Dmitri Shostakovich
Orchestra: Boston Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Andris Nelsons
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Deutsche Grammophon
Catalogue: 4835220
Release: 2018
Size: 2.05 GB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Op. 43
01. 1. Allegretto poco moderato
02. 2. Presto
03. 3. Moderato con moto
04. 4. Largo
05. 5. Allegro
Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103 ‘The year 1905’
06. 1. The Palace Square (Adagio)
07. 2. The Ninth of January (Allegro – Adagio – Allegro – Adagio)
08. 3. Eternal Memory (Adagio)
09. 4. The Tocsin (Allegro non troppo)
Deutsche Grammophon proudly continues the widely acclaimed, Grammy winning Shostakovich Symphony cycle with Music Director Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Andris Nelsons is the Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and new Gewandhauskapellmeister of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. With both appointments, and in leading a pioneering alliance between these two esteemed institutions, he is firmly underlined as one of the most renowned, exciting and innovative conductors on the international scene today. After the “scandalously successful” (Sunday Times) Symphony No. 10 in 2015 and “the sheer expressive beauty” Gramophone Magazine) of Symphonies Nos. 5, 8, 9 from 2016 Andris Nelsons and his Bostonians turn their attention to the extrovert Fourth and dramatic Eleventh – both recorded live for the third instalment of this long-term collaboration of the Boston Symphony Orchestra – “America’s most cultured orchestra” (BBC Music Magazine).
Clocking in at over an hour for the Fourth, and almost an hour for the Eleventh or “1905”, these are the two longest and fullest of Shostakovich’s symphonies. What’s remarkable is that the Fourth, finished in 1936, was only performed in 1961 – eleven years after the performance of the Eleventh in 1957! It was in 1936 that the poor composer felt a bullet whistle by him, following an infamous article in Pravda, dictated by Stalin: “Chaos in Place of Music”, which torpedoed the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: the work was carefully locked away, only to be brought back out once the dictator was dead, buried and comprehensively decomposed.
You can see where the composer was coming from! The tone of this Fourth hasn’t the slightest hint of optimism, We hear dark Mahlerian accents, desperate flights and tortured harmonies: not exactly the music of a bright tomorrow. The Eleventh, structured according to a “political” programme, celebrating the revolutionaries of 1905 and the tragic events of Bloody Sunday – when the Russian army fired on a crowd, killing 96 according to official sources and several thousand according to others – with a much more optimistic tone, although we know what optimism means in the world of Shostakovich. The two symphonies were recorded at public concerts, in autumn 2017 and spring 2018 respectively by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and their conductor Andris Nelsons.