Ovation--Shostakovich: Symphony No. 13 / Haitink
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Free Music Notes for Ovation--Shostakovich: Symphony No. 13 / Haitink
Free Music Review: Clear, Passionate, and Cold...all appropriate
Hit: 5 Stars
This was one of the first Shostakovich smyphonies I heard after his famous Fifth. Startled at first by the starring vocal elements, I got used to it and loved it. Interesting to note, I played this symphony while playing video games. So even though those video games have different soundtracks, whenever I think about them, I still imagine this symphony as the soundtrack.
There are a lot of good recordings of this symphony, and this is among the better ones. Everytime I listen to this work, it makes me realize how unfair its neglect is in the concert hall. This is by far Shostakovich's most successful writing for choral forces. Coming as it did after the rather disappointing (as he admitted) 12th symphony, Shostakovich must've been satisfied with this artistic birth.
Haitink has a great lineup. The Concertgebouw orchestra, and men from the Concertgebouw chorus. Marius Rintzler is near-perfect. He has the right timbre and phrasing. Speaking of which, timbre and phrasing are very important in this symphony. If it wasn't for the well-done performance in respect to the timbre and phrasing, the last three movements of this symphony could very well be boring. There is no hint of dryness in this performance, thankfully.
I guess the most enjoyable aspect of this symphony is the fact that is a 'choral' symphony that actually works. There are legions of vocal/choral symphonies (two of them by this composer) that are simply either aggravating or just not terribly interesting.
In five movements, with choral, bass soloist as well as large orchestra, this symphony is a setting of poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Shostakovich employs all his inventive resources, and that includes sprakling and dark mysterious passages, sad largos, hair-raising outbursts of sound among others. It is truly a work that would fit right in with the concert hall. In fact, while the work was not a critical success when it premiered (Pravda, duh), it WAS a popular success. If Shostakovich heard Haitink's performance he would agree that this symphony belongs in the concert hall.
As a final note, you should petition the largest orchestra in your area to program it. But in the meantime, there's a lot to enjoy just listening to it on CD. Enjoy the music!
Free Music Review: A well of sorrows, and some thin writing from Shostakovich
Hit: 4 Stars
The 13th Sym. was an exciting political event when Ormandy (I believe it was) premiered the work in the U.S., coming as a Cold War protest work from a major Soviet artist--two, actually, since the renegade poet Yevtushenko, who wrote the text, was a darling of the cultural thaw as well. In retrospect, the Thirteenth Sym. hasn't weakened to the extent that Shostakovich's equally renowned Seventh Sym. has. The music in the first movment holds up well, as it should since the poem, Babi Yar, with its brave protest against Russian anti-Semitism in World War II, remains a cry from the heart.
But the reamaining four movements rapidly decline into something like politically correct protest against the daily hardship of life for the common Russian--not a great subjet for inspiring music. It takes a lot for a conductor to overcome the banality and dreariness that settles into this well of sorrows.
Haitink's performance is blessed with excellent sound and orchestral execution--both far ahead of any rival CD from Russia, although the live performance from Prague under Maxim Shostakovich on Supraphon is competitive. It is also more commiited and angrier than Haitink's reading, which tends to sound a bit too polite. in both cases the chorus and bass soloist are very good.
Frankly, I get fatigued hearing a Boris Godunov-type bass dwelling on sorrow for fifty minutes, so it was a happy event to find that one recording--the Sinaisky on the BBC label, a live tape from a Proms concert in London--features a lighter baritone in the excellent Sergei Leiferkus. He is an accomplished vocal actor, better than any bass I've heard in this part, and his leaner voice makes the protest poetry sound moe urgent. Otherwise, I keep the Hiatink and M. Shostakovich sets on my shelf as very good alternatives.
Free Music Review: Sounds Great, But Misses The Heart
Hit: 3 Stars
As other reviewers point out, this is a monumental, great sounding performance. It is also heavy handed, slow, and misses something essential to the work that Shostakovich created in his Symphony #13. What is the 'Babi Yar' symphony? It began when Shostakovich read Yevtushenko's controversial poem 'Babi Yar' and decided to set it to music. He then expanded the work into a song cycle of settings of Yevtushenko's poems, one of which was specifically written for the cycle. The heart of the work is the bass who sings these songs. A male choir responds to and ampifies what the soloist sings. The orchestra fills out and illustrates the music that the soloist sings. This is the work Shostakovich wrote. It is not what Haitink delivers. In this massive performance, he clarifies the structures and textures of the accompaniment and puts them first. The chorus and soloist are just pieces of a symphonic puzzle to be elucidated and virtuosically played. The performance is almost the reverse of Shostakovich's intention. The considerable emotional range of each of the songs is flattened by Haitink's heavy hand into relative monotony. (When you hear another bass sing this, you'll understand) The slow, tightly controlled tempos don't help matters. Whatever you may think of Yevtushenko's poetry, they are NOT emotionally flat or tightly controlled! There are livelier performances of this work out there that are truer to nature of this symphony, even though they are generally less available. Keep looking. It's worth it.Free Music Review: A MUSICAL MONUMENT
Hit: 5 Stars
This is surely a 5* effort of its type, the type being a big-scale, forceful, in-your-face type.The recording is right for such a reading being very clear and sharply etched, the orchestral playing is magnificent and the bass solo is majestic as he would have to be to stay in keeping but with an appropriate sense of reticence too - any suggestion of Amonasro or Wotan or even Boris Godunov would have been wince-making.Part of Mahler's legacy is that things now get called symphonies that Brahms or Bruckner would have called cantatas. To me this `symphony' is a cantata. Indeed in the old Rozhdestvensky version the bass solo is semi-spoken, which would make it a `parlata' if there is such a word. Where it is completely different in spirit from Brahms or Bruckner or Bach or Handel is in the music being subordinate to the message, not the other way about as it always is with them. There are five separate but linked messages, the frustrated, ironic and distraught states of mind of `a stranger and afraid/In a world he never made'. The poems are by Yevtushenko, and I would imagine (I have no Russian) that the purely poetic element is similarly subordinated to the themes expressed. To me music is always a separate thing from any themes or messages it is associated with, and that is probably why I have never fully come to terms with Shostakovich from whose standpoint such thinking might well have seemed a bit of a luxury. Purely as music this work ought to impress anyone of even the slightest sensitivity, but for all its power it still leaves me unable to identify a distinctive musical personality in this composer the way I can identify the personality of Prokofiev. Shostakovich is eclectic, very adroit with all the styles he adopts, but is there some `real' musical identity that I can derive from the music itself without reference to his biography, which is not the way I like to approach any music? To compare him in artistic significance with Saint-Saens would be outrageous, but in that respect they have a strange similarity.
Obviously the Babiy Yar atrocity is the most powerful of the 5 themes here. The work was composed in 1962, a mere 20 years after the event itself and the events elsewhere in Europe with which it had such a conspicuous and frightful affinity. 40 years on the pious orthodoxy is that we must make sure that such an event never recurs. In actual fact we have had all-too-similar events in Cambodia, in Rwanda and in Yugoslavia, the last two sharing the particularly filthy characteristic of being racially-motivated. Not only have we failed to prevent these, we seem to have all but forgotten them, and a new Holocaust-industry is now serving some strange objectives. I retain faith that the race that gave the world Mendelssohn and Mahler, to say nothing of Einstein, can yet rise above what has become self-obsession and lay the injustices finally to rest with a monument as noble and powerful as this.
Free Music Review: A stunning performance
Hit: 5 Stars
I have always seen #13 as the greatest of Shostakovich's symphonies. Its moods include despair, defiance (both loud and quiet), anger at oppression, but ultimately ends in a mood of some optimism. Ultimately it affirms that the artist has a duty to speak the truth, no matter what the risk. The artist must force people to acknowledge what they would prefer to ignore, and although the artist may suffer greatly for this, he will ultimately triumph and be remembered.Shostakovich was certainly writing from the heart when composing this symphony, and the result is a gripping work from beginning to end. Haitink and the Concertgebouw Orchestra have done an excellent job. I believe this is the finest of Haitink's Shostakovich cycle. Some people have criticized his treatment as being heavy-handed, but I don't see how one could listen to the final movement and make that accusation,
This is an essential CD for any Shostakovich collection. If you know Shostakovich only for his 5th Symphony, then you will be in for a suprise.
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