Symphony 1-15 [Box set, Import]

As a (just) 18-year-old U S Army company clerk stationed in Chigasaki, Japan, in 1953, I drove the captain and first sergeant out of the orderly room each day by turning on my radio and listening to music -- NHK and Radio Moscow most of the day. (My suspicion is that I gave them an excuse to go drinking.)

In December of that year Radio Moscow announced that the premier of Dmitri Shostakovich's 10th Symphony would be broadcast at something like 2:00 in the morning (Japan time). I managed to rouse myself, go to the orderly room, and hear that historic performance. (Retransmitted from Vladivostok, the sound was very good.)

I immediately wrote Shostakovich, telling him how much I loved the 10th, and also his 1st, 5th, and 9th Symphonies and the piano quintet (the only Shostakovich I'd heard at that point).

The composer replied in a brief note I have treasured for nearly half a century. (It was thoughtfully translated for me by a member of the Army's Counterintelligence Corps).

I've loved Shostakovich -- and most of his music -- most of my life; and I've collected, first on LP and now on CD (and DVD), nearly everything he wrote.

The symphonies themselves are uneven in quality: I could live without the 2d and 3d, perhaps the 12th as well; and for the life of me I cannot understand what he was getting at with the 15th. But I've listened to many or most recordings of all of them. And I find Rudolf Barshai's as good as -- or better than -- just about anybody else's in just about all of the symphonies.

Take the 4th and 6th Symphonies, masterpieces far too seldom performed. Barshai does a better job by far than Bernard Haitink (London), among others, in welding the problematic 1st movement into a cohesive whole. And Barshai's leisurely reading of the 6th's opening largo makes me wish that it soared closer to 190 than to 19 minutes in length.

In the 9th I believe Barshai has no peer. My only serious disappointment comes in the 14th, that magnificent song-cycle, where his soloists do not begin to capture the hope, despair, and fury of their parts.

The sound on these recordings is magnificent. The Köln orchestra is not one of the world's premiere ensembles; neither is it merely a provincial band. Occasional weakness in the strings is the only serious fault I find with the orchestra's playing.

Barshai, a Shostakovich friend and sometime collaborator, has given us definitive performances of the 15 symphonies. They aren't perfect; but nobody else's are either.

At the price, there is no reason for anyone who appreciates the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich not to own this set.

I am actually more than mildly surprised to see this boxed set of the Shostakovich symphonies, performed by Rudolf Barshai and the Southwest Radio Orchestra (Germany) available here at Amazon.com. Brilliant Classics is not a label that gets wide distribution in the U.S. (although one can find releases on this label if one knows where to look).

Any - perhaps every - collector of the Shostakovich symphonies can put together a listing of his or her favorite performances, work-by-work, without once referring to this Barshai boxed set. I know that I can, and that such a listing for me would include performances by Bernstein (the 5th), Gergiev (the 7th) Haitink (several, but most especially the 8th and the 15th), both Janssons and Karajan (the 10th), Ormandy (the 4th), Rostropovich (the 11th, in his new LSO Live recording), Stokowski (the 1st and the 11th) and Zander (the 5th). All of these (and more) are already in my library, and I wouldn't want to be without any of them.

But all of this is beside the point. In virtually every way (including performance and sonics), these Barshai recordings are highly competitive, and, as an integral complete set, are topped only by the Haitink set (at considerably higher cost). Barshai, for many years, was a close associate of Shostakovich (and the arranger of, among other pieces, Shostakovich's remarkable 8th Quartet for chamber orchestra as his "Chamber Symphony"), and he has this music in his blood. This long personal association means that Barshai understands not only what we have come to call "authentic performance practice," but all of the myriad "hidden meanings" to be found in this most autobiographical of composers.

Overall, the weaknesses are very few. The packaging is Spartan, and the documentation even less than that. If I continue to prefer Haitink for the 8th and 15th Symphonies, it is by the smallest of margins. Ditto for Gergiev in the 7th Symphony. Everywhere else, Barshai elicits performances that are truly "top drawer," with recorded sound to match. And how often will one go out of one's way to obtain recordings of Shostakovich's 2nd and 3rd Symphonies on a full-price label? Not often at all, meaning that most people miss these two works entirely. Not that they are Shostakovich at his best (particularly with their "agitprop" finales), but I must confess that there are some pleasant surprises in the early movements of the Shostakovich 2nd Symphony, written during his most "experimental" phase and sounding quite like Charles Ives in places: "Gorky Park in the Dark" might be a clever way of putting matters.

Those already having good collections of the symphonies are probably already aware of this bargain box, and will get it (or have already gotten it) just for its comprehensiveness and uniformity of interpretation and quality. Those just starting out to discover Shostakovich and his symphonies could hardly do better than acquire this bargain box: For about what one would normally pay for just three or four of the symphonies on full-price labels, you can have the full set of works by Barshai, and begin your journey comfortable with the fact that these are authoritative performances by an acknowledged Shostakovich master.

Bob Zeidler

While great conductors can conceivably arise in any culture, in any decade, it happens so far to be the case that Russian conductors of a certain era have so far carried the Keys to the Kingdom of the 15 Shostakovich symphonies. The great pricing of this complete set should encourage people who don't know much of the composer, except perhaps for the famous Fifth Symphony; to get much better acquainted. Brilliant Classics is a super-budget label, at least in the U.S.A. So get this now, since nobody knows just how long the distributors will be able to keep bringing it in. Yes, thinking of 15 symphonies by this often quirky and musically challenging composer may seem a bit daunting. But the advantage here, is the authentic pacing and musical narrative brought to each of the fifteen, by conductor Rudolf Barshai. He is old enough to have lived through some of the Soviet era in its more repressive features, while he is young enough to have survived intact. When Barshai shapes a phrase, it more often than not has the heroic, melancholy sweetness of Great Mother Russia, and somehow sounds rooted in the folksong and Slavic church music traditions that manage to inform the deeper origins of Russian classical music, even though Shostakovich wasn't directly quoting folk melodies or even consciously mirroring their lyrical character. The orchestra is quite good, surpassing the Slav Radio Orchestra which is the most direct budget-priced competition on Naxos. Every department of the orchestra can handle the musical assignments and then some. The band, by the way, is the West German Radio aka Cologne Radio, and did marvelous things under the late, lamented Gunter Wand before he moved on to North German venues. The other comments suggest that you will want to supplement this box set, adding carefully considered individual readings of selected symphonies by (probably) more well-known orchestras and Star Conductors. Well, yes, strictly speaking, this is a fine idea. I have long cherished, for example, the wonderful Fifth Symphony as played by the Berlin Philharmonic under the gifted Semyon Bychkov. Too bad he didn't get to do a complete cycle of his own, IMHO. But, focusing on the additions only gets you to thinking that this set has performances which are lacking. That is not the case. Although you can conceivably play one or another of the fifteen symphonies, differently than Barshai and the Cologne musicians play them; that does not mean that this traversal is lacking. Far from it. Even at higher prices .... may the Goddess of music forbid ... this set would be in the running. So, shake off your reservations or hesitations or whatever it is that has held you back from wandering through the entirely large, often witty, often melancholy vistas offered in the scope of the symphonies. This set is an excellent place to start, and to continue. You may also want to check out the incredibly nuanced performances of the complete String Quartets, played by the Manhattan Quartet. Happy listening. Five stars, stars, stars.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 15 reviews  4.6 out of 5 stars