Luogo e data di registrazione		John F. Kennedy Center, Whasington (USA): - gennaio 1993 (Symphonies Nos. 1, 9) - febbraio 1992 (Symphony No. 4) - giugno 1994 (Symphonies Nos. 5, 6) - gennaio 1989 (Symphony No. 7) - ottobre 1991 (Symphony No. 8) - ottobre/novembre 1992 (Symphony No. 11) - gennaio 1988 (Symphony No. 13) St Augustine's Church, London (Inghilterra): - febbraio 1993 (Symphonies Nos. 2, 3) - gennaio 1995 (Symphony No. 12) Abbey Road Studios, London (Inghilterra): - luglio 1989 (Symphony No. 10) - novembre 1989 (Symphony No. 15) Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory (URSS): - febbraio 1973 (Symphony No. 14)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio regordings: - Symphonies Nos, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15 live recordings: - Symphony No. 14
	Producer		Martin Fouqué (Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14) Michel Garcin (Nos. 7, 10, 13, 15)
	Balance Engineer		Eberhard Sengpiel (Nos. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 12) Ulrich Ruscher (No. 4) Jean Chatauret (Nos. 7, 10, 13, 15) Michael Brammann (No. 8)
	Assistant engineers		Christoph Franke (Nos. 1, 9) Wolfram Nehls (Nos. 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12) Jens Schunemann (Nos. 2, 3) Stefan Weinzierl (Nos. 2, 3) Edward J. Kelly (No. 6) Mike Hatch (No. 12) Paul Zinman (No. 11) Christian Delbavie (No. 13)
	Prima Edizione LP		MELODYA USSR - CM 04009-10 - (1 LP) - (p) 1973 - Analogico - (Symphony No. 14)
	Edizione CD		TELDEC - 4509-90849-2 - (1 CD - 59' 00") - (p) & (c) 1994 - DDD - (Symphonies Nos. 1 & 9) TELDEC - 4509-90853-2 - (1 CD - 48' 00") - (p) & (c) 1994 - DDD - (Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3) TELDEC - 9031-76261-2 - (1 CD - 64' 34") - (p) & (c) 1992 - DDD - (Symphony No. 4) TELDEC - 4509-94557-2 - (1 CD - 45' 27") - (p) & (c) 1995 - DDD - (Symphony No. 5) TELDEC - 4509-95070-2 - (1 CD - 71' 37") - (p) & (c) 1997 - DDD - (Symphonies Nos. 6 & 12) ERATO - 2292-45414-2 - (1 CD - 71' 25") - (p) & (c) 1991 - DDD - (Symphony No. 7) TELDEC - 9031-74719-2 - (1 CD - 61' 16") - (p) & (c) 1992 - DDD - (Symphony No. 8) TELDEC - 9031-74529-2 - (1 CD - 56' 14") - (p) & (c) 1991 - DDD - (Symphony No. 10) TELDEC - 9031-76262-2 - (1 CD - 68' 56") - (p) & (c) 1993 - DDD - (Symphony No. 11) ERATO - 2292-45349-2 - (1 CD - 62' 21") - (p) & (c) 1989 - DDD - (Symphony No. 13) MELODYA/TELDEC - 0630-17514-2 - (1 CD - 51' 47") - (p) 1974 & (c) 1997 - ADD - (Symphony No. 14) TELDEC - 9031-74560-2 - (1 CD - 44' 34") - (p) & (c) 1991 - DDD - (Symphony No. 15)
	Note		-

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH: THE FIFTEEN SYMPHONIES On 12 May 1926, a gawky, bespectacled nineteenyear-old took the applause in the Great Hall of  The Leningrad Philharmonic, following the successful premiere of his First Symphony. Like many Russian symphonies before and after, this was the prescribed work for a graduating conservatoire student, and it had been composed under the supportive if less than wholly approving eyes of Shostakovich's composition teacher Maximilian Steinberg - pupil and son-in-law of Rimsky-Korsakov - and Alexander Glazunov, a long-since-spent force as a composer but still revered as pedagogue. And it was as forward-looking and stylistically diverse as their symphonies were conservative and unified. As the work's fame spread, with the likes of Bruno Walter and Arturo Toscanini taking it into their repertoire, it became apparent that the brittle, cynical, hedonistic yet nervy spirit of the Roaring Twenties - seemingly so inimical to the traditional high-flown aspirations of symphonism - hat at last found a symphony to give it a voice. It was a startling amalgam of seemingly incompatible dialects: Stravinskian balletic puppetry, post-Tchaikovskian lyric pathos and Hindemithian back-to-Bach "linear" counterpoint, all blended with comic stunts more appropriate to the circus and silent cinema than to the concert hall. And with that blend was a strikingly original tone of voice: restless and impatient, transgressive and wilful, with a cutting edge of malicious glee. Nearly forty-six years later, on 8 January 1972, in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, the same composer was fêted at the first performance of his Fifteenth and last symphony. The musical language and style were recognisably from the same pen. In the first movement especially there was something of the same saucy effervescence, the same relish for flouting decorum. But by now the underlying anxiety and propensity to funereal brooding were far more pronounced. Famous works were quoted along the way: Rossini's William Tell Overture in the first movement, Siegfried's Funeral March from Wagner's Ring in the last. But far from clarifying the music's message such allusions only added to the layers of mystery, like a jigsaw puzzle from which key pieces have been withheld. Moments of tenderness and innocence in the second movement and finale were now only objects of memory and longing somehow always out of reach, and the work ended in a magical A major like no other in the history of music - haunted by ghosts of the composer's former selves, which might have had astonishing tales to tell, had they but been allowed to speak freely. That paradoxical sense of simultaneous presence and absence would be one of Shostakovich's great legacies to the next generation of composers - the likes of Schnittke, Kancheli and Silvestrov - in a Soviet Union that itself had less than two decades to survive. In between was a career of extraordinary changes of fortune, in a country and a world of bewildering extremes: advanced civilization hand in hand with barbarism on a scale beyond description. With hindsight, Shostakovich's multi-faceted temperament - skepticism tempered by social conscience, evasiveness by over whelming directness, independence by compassion - may be seen as uniquely adapted to the spirit of his age. But not all those characteristics were inborn; they were nurtured by artistic affinities and influences, and forged in the fire of harsh circumstance, most conspicuously at the time of the epic central group of symphonies, Nos. 4-10, from the era of "High Stalinism". All these works were closely monitored by Shostakovich's peers, often in anything but a comradely spirit. If iconoclasm could be excused in the pluralistic 1920s, as part and parcel of a critique of the bourgeois pre-Revolutionary past, from the early 1930s on the order of the day was affirmation subject matter, plus a huge ready-made audience with an intense need for catharsis. These would evaporate with the advent of glasnost in the mid-1980s, with near-disastrous consequences for Russian composers. For that reason alone we may never hear the like of Shostakovich's music again, even should another composer of such extravagant gifts ever be born. ·········· The pressures on Shostakovich varied with time. Composing his First Symphony in 1924-25, his main aim had clearly been to make his mark. Almost immediately afterwards, however, he experienced an intense artistic crisis. Unsure how to build on the foundations of his essentially old-fashioned training, he threw himself into encounters with the Western avant-garde (principally Berg, Hindemith, Krenek, Stravinsky and, rather more than is often realised, Prokofiev), working them out in two hybrid cantata-symphonies that multitasked as outward expressions of commitment to Bolshevism. At the broadest level, both works can be viewed as responses to the Beethoven centenary celebrations of 1927, where the composer was co-opted as an honorary proto-Socialist. Both are in effect symphony-odes that move from chaos to order, very loosely modelled on the finale of Beethoven's Ninth. The Second Symphony came about as the result of a commission from the Propaganda Department of the State Music Publishing House to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Originally entitled Symphonic Dedication to October, it followed the example of earlier commemorative pieces, such as Mikhail Gnesin's Symphonic Monument of 1925 and Alexander Krein's Funeral Ode in Memory of Lenin (1925-26), but more particularly of the open-air agitprop theatrical representations of the early revolutionary days, often supervised by Futurist artists and dramatists using sophisticated means to transmit simplistic ideological messages. Shostakovich presents musical equivalents of the successions of "floats" frequently seen in those days in Russia's public spaces. In its broad outline of modernistic first half and bombastic final chorus, the "First of May" Symphony follows the same pattern as the "October" Symphony, but with a smaller dose of Bergian neo-Expressionism and a larger one of Hindemithian linear counterpoint. Then, in his Fourth Symphony, Shostakovich put into practice his even more decisive creative encounter with the music of Gustav Mahler. Here the rhetorics of revivified bourgeois romantic symphonism and modernistic urbanism collide, the amalgam gaining chilling social resonance in the atmosphere of incipient Terror following the assassination of Leningrad Party boss Sergey Kirov in December 1934 (widely believed to have been at Stalin's instigation and certainly used by him as the pretext for ruthless purges of the Communist Party, which developed an appalling momentum as they spread to the general population through 1937 and 1938). Perhaps some such shotgun wedding between Mahlerian idealism and Bolshevik utopianism would have marked Shostakovich's definitive maturity, had he not been overtaken by another crisis, this time from outside. In early 1936, when he was at work on the finale of the Fourth Symphony, Pravda published anonymous denuncuatory articles about his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and his ballet Bright Stream. For all their shocking impact at the time, those broadsides were a logical consequence of the steadily increasing authoritarianism that Stalin's regime had been unfolding since his rise to power in 1928. They were a sign that the relative pluralism in the arts that had prevailed in the 1920s was no longer to be tolerated, and that the recently anthroned dogma of Socialist Realism was an instrument of control, entailing compulsory conformity to the Party Line. If novelists and playwrights had to angle their plots towards the glorious Socialist future, so symphonists somehow had to find the musical equivalent. For an instinctive individualist and sceptic such as Shostavovich, there could have been few greater challenges. He managed to complete the Fourth Symphony but higher authorities put him under irresistible pressure to withdraw the work, and it remained under an unofficial ban until its rehabilitation twenty-five years later, well into the post-Stalin Thaw. Clearly for Shostakovich's self-reinvention to pass muster he would have to make far greater stylistic concessions. This he did the following year with his Fifth Symphony, at once sealing his rehabilitation and achieving a global success even more spectacular than that of his symphonic debut. The Fifth Symphony's depth of feeling, and its determination to speak of suffering and survival, albeit in a compulsorily re-modulated voice, struck deep chords among an intelligentsia beset by mass denunciations, deportations to the Gulags and general state-sponsored paranoia. At the same time it captured something vital about the international spirit of the 1930s, as surely as the First Symphony had that of the previous decade. Whatever the odds stacked against him, and whatever compromises he may have been forced into, Shostakovich never relinquished his determination to create under his own terms. Far from sheltering under the umbrella of his canonised Fifth, he struck out for new shores with his Sixth Symphony in 1939, bewildering audiences and commentators with a three-movement work whose rollicking conclusion seems to have little connection with its solemn opening, and whose forst movement points down several different paths before retreating into virtual hibernation. Then with the Nazi invasion of June 1941 came both a new ethical imperative and a renewed licence to embody imagery of violence and resistance. Begun in the besieged city of Leningrad and completed in evacuation by the end of that year, the Seventh Symphony - known as the "Leningrad" - once again attracted worldwide attention, this time for its graphic depiction of the enemy invasion and of the unbreakable will of the nation. But for his next symphony two years later he turned instead to his Fifth for a model, imbuing the first four movements of the Eighth with an unparalleled degree of violence, anguish and protest, yet shying away from the Fifth's surface triumphalism by allowing the last pages to fade into a twilight wherein some discern hope, others exhaustion, and still others an indivisible multivalence (for Rostropovich the Eighth Symphony was prophetic in that it "showed us... that even more suffering lay in store for us"). Nor was the year of victory bring a symphony with all the conventional trimmings, for the five movements of No. 9 are lean and compact (less so, admittedly, if the score's request for between sixty-four and eighty-four string players is followed to the letter), yet constantly challenging the listener to divine what is mask and what reality. A second encounter with institutionalized philistinism, in the shape of andrey Zhadanov's anti-Formalist campaign of 1948, put serious symphonic composition on ice for a number of years. But in any case that impulse was already beginning to transfer to other media: principally string quartets and concertos. Then, following the death of Stalin in March 1953, the line of Shostakovich's epic philosophical symphonies culminated magnificently in the Tenth, a compositional tour de force in its enshrining of the darkest experiences of the mind-twentieth century in a construction of Beethovenian ambition and craftsmanship. That was a peak he would not seek to scale again. The cultural relaxion of the post-Stalin Thaw was marked by a gradual reacquaintance with symphonic composition was not evident. Younger Soviet composers began to set their compasses for new journeys that Shostakovich was only partially inclined to follow. Meanwhile the loss of his first wife in 1954 and of his mother the following year knocked the foundations out from under his life. Soon, too, the beginnings of failing health, combined with mounting pressures to play the role of cultural figurehead at home and ambassador abroad, further sapped his strength. With Symphonies No. 11 (1957) and No. 12 (1961) Shostakovich tested the loyalty of those of his younger colleagues who were eager to enjoy the new-promised freedoms. These symphonies depict heroic landmarks in the Soviet calendar - the Bloody Sunday massacre at the Tsar's Winter Palace in 1905 and the October Revolution of 1917, - and, though the nature of that depiction is cinematographically literal enough, the intentions behind it remain hard to read (for Rostropovich the Eleventh is "a requiem for the [1905] revolution, for all revolutions", while the Twelfth contains "a note of criticism"). Shostakovich was by now an iconic figure. The State wanted to own him, and in 1960 it finally cajoled him into accepting candidature for Party membership. He could conceivably have taken the morally purer option of noncompliance - or even of more overt "dissidence", as it was becoming known in the late-1950s. Instead he chose to work within the system he despised, seeking to serve and preserve. The example he presented of an artist striving to maintain his principles, while simultameously occupying positions of power that at times fatally compromised those principles, was hardly likely to gain universal approval, especially when Shostakovich occasionally lit his name be co-opted against the new voices of conscience. But it did give his music an extraordinary breadth and depth of resonance, since most of Russia's intelligentsia was at some level condemned to the same kind of double life. Yet with the Thirteenth Symphony Shostakovich achieved another kind of rehabilitation, this time with the younger generation of Russian artists and intellectuals, by setting a series of five poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko that contained thinly veiled allegories for angoing social ills in the Soviet Union. Boldest and most controversial  was the excoriation of anti-Semitism in the opening movement, which takes its title from the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev, where the Nazis had exterminated thousands of Jews but where the Soviets had declined to erect a memorial. Shostakovich's realisation of the ethical and communicative power of the symphonic sing-cycle was sharpened by his friendship with Benjamin Britten, to whom he dedicated his Fourteenth Symphony (1969), a cycle of eleven poems brooding on and railing against death. And finally his symphonic swansong, the profound yet inscrutable Fifteenth of 1971, seems to look back over a damaged life with alternating sardonic humour, depression, outrage and resignation: an archetypal work of art, if ever there was one, for the late twentieth century. ·········· Apart from the nerve it took to compose this music in those times and circumstances, it takes nerve to listen to a Shostakovich symphony and nerve to perform it. An instrumental solo may carry the burden of reflecting on unspeakable brutality; another may embody the quintessence of that brutality. Not infrequently the full orchestra has to combine weight and depth of tone with velocity and agility in a way hardly any other composer has ever demanded. If the musicians fail, they let down not just themselves, but somehow also the people whose lives and suffering the composer so passionately memorialised. No conductor can claim a sharper sense of that responsability than Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007). Famed as a cellist since his competition successes in the late-1940s, and especially seince his Western debuts from the mid-1950s, he developed a parallel career as a conductor in the 1960s, making his operatic debut with Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoy in 1968 and his UK debut in September 1974, and directing the sensational first recording of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1978. His relationship with Shostakovich and his music dates back to the autumn of 1943, when he began attending Shostakovich's orchestration class at the Moscow Conservatoire and even showed him some compositions of his own; they recorded the Cello Sonata together, and both Shostakovich's cello concertos are dedicated to Rostropovich. Their friendship endured until Rostropovich's emigration in 1974 following his outspoken support for the then disgraced Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He has said that he considers the Shostakovich symphonies to enshrine "the emotional history of our country, my history, his history, our history". From the late-1980s he began recording the complete cycle (mainly with the Nationa Symphony Orchestra of Washington DC, whose music director he had become in 1977), thereby fulfilling the promise he had made to the composer before leaving the Soviet Union. David Fanning