Luogo e data di registrazione		Moscow: - 1984 (Opp. 10 & 47) - 1983 (Opp. 54 & 70)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Recording Engineers		S. Pazhukin (Opp. 10 & 70), E. Shakhnazaryan (Op. 54), I. Veprintsev & E. Buneyeva (Op. 47)
	Prime Edizioni LP		Melodiya
	Edizione CD		BMG Classics "2 CD Twofer" 74231 49611 2 | 2 CD - 64' 47" - 72' 46" | (c) 1997 | (p) 1983-1985 | DDD
	Note		Front cover: Ilya Glazunov, "The first snow", 1968

A conductor of unusual calibre The symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) are among the classics of the twentieth century. They are inseparable from the circumstances in which they were composed: enthusiasm at the dawn of a new era and the ensuing fight for survival under a cruel regime. Yet this is not their message. Each generation has placed its own interpretation on these symphonies, the composer's own contemporaries included. Conductors like Evgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988), who conducted the premieres of most of the Shostakovich symphonies, belonged to the generation which felt the utter powerlessness of the individual. This led to a kind of interpretative "composure", which put details into sharp, and sometimes over-precise, docus, to relentlessness and objectivity. The opposite is true for Gennady Rozhdestvensky, born in 1931, and thus of the succeeding generation. He placed his faith in the scope of the subject, and realized it too, despite many setbacks. For this reason, interpretative composure is not part of his approach, but rather a surcharged emotionality and hot-headed, exaggerated clarity, particularly in the emphasis he places on black humour and irony. While Shostakovich was still alive, Gennady Rozhdestvensky performed the miracle of staging the composer's officially ostracized first opera The Nose in Moscow for the first time in 1974 - forty-four years after its premiere! The composer was to reward him well and lovingly. Following Shostakovich's death, Rozhdestvensky concerned himself with the early works - not exactly popular with the authorities - and, using the composer's manuscripts to reconstruct the opera The Gambleers as well as various pieces of film music, made them available on a series of recordings entitled "From the manuscripts of the early years". At the same time, he began working on the largescale project of recording all the Shostakovich symphonies with "his" orchestra, the Orchestra of the Ministry for Culture of the USSR, which had been created for him in 1982. Rozhdestvensky was at that time already much in demand as a conductor outside the Soviet Union (principal conductor of the Stockholm Philharmonic, 1974-77, and of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, 1978-81), and he exploited his international acclaim by giving public exposure to the full breadth and significance of Shostakovich's work. His very first international presentation, of the Symphony no. 1 in F minor op. 10 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London in 1958, was a sensation. At the time Rozhdestvensky was 27 years of age and deputy conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Dmitri Shostakovich had composed his first symphony as his final examination piece for the Conservatoire in 1926, when he was nineteen. Performed for the first time by Nikolai Malko and the Leningrad Philharmonic in 1926, the work was received with acclaim and was to form the basis of his reputation as a composer. Bruno Walter conducted the work in Berlin in 1926 and in Vienna and Mannheim in 1930, while its American premiere took place under the baton of Leopold Stokowski in 1928. This symphony already contains all the elements which would characterize the later works: audacious instrumental subjects, most particularly the inclusion of the solo piano (movements 2 and 4), the everpresent potential for tragic tone in the tentative melodic developments, violently explosive scherzo grotesques that speak of hurt at the way of the world (second movement), the sound of the streets, including march-like intonations, waltz fragments, laments. The third movement (Lento), for example, is based upon the harmonic and rhythmic ideogram of the old lament "Immortal victims". Sublimity derives from the banal and trivial, and vice versa. There is no "unity of mood". Instead, opposing and generally mutually exclusive areas of expression are linked and confronted. Traditional elements are incorporated with supreme mastery. In the final movement, dark runs in the strings and chromatic passages create a "Götterdammerung" mood as in Richard Wagner and, in the style of Gustav Mahler, a "cheerful" execution i straged to drums and brass. Instead of defining and presenting these elements under the guise of "educating the masses" (as is the case in many performances), Rozhdestvensky fuses them in all their disparity into a compelling commentary on the state of the world. A masterpiece in  a masterly interpretation. Composed in April/May 1937, the Symphony no. 5 in D minor, op. 47 assumed the significance of "fateful symphony" for Shostakovich. He wrote it at the time of the worst of Stalin's "purges", of mass execution and deportation. The composer had every reason to fear being deported. Friends of his, such as the marshal of the Red Army, Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893-1937), were being shot under martial law. Shostakovich himself had fallen out of Stalin's favour with his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the beginning of 1936. His works were deleted from concert programmes overnight, and he himself had been declared an "enemy of the people". He was given the chance in 1937 to "rehabilitate" himself with a new work. Today we know that this redemption was the result of Maxim Gorky's personal written plea to Stalin. Uncompromising in the music of his fifth symphony, in the run-up to its first performance Shostakovich had nevertheless verbally declared his adherence to Socialist Realism and had given his symphony an appropriate label: "The growth of a personality". This token of allegiance was accepted by the Societ rulers, yet to sensitive listeners at the premiere the discrepancy between word and worl was apparent. Their demonstrative applause was for the codead message. In the opinion of the Shostakovich biographer, Solomon Volkov, "an upright, thinking person is represented here, who, under tremendous moral pressure, has to make a crucial decision. Neurotic pulse beats run through the whole symphony, the composer searching feverishly for a way out of the labyrinth, only to find himself, in the finale (...), in the 'gas chamber of thoughts' once more". This symphony is one of the most popular, and at the same time one of the most misunderstood of Shostakovich's works. The difficulty lies in making its tragic elements understandable to people living in circumstances which are socially and biographically far from the tragic. Rozhdestvensky exaggerates with denunciatory delight and raging fury the noisy, idle activism of the bureaucrats of then and now, and has the monologues of the solo instruments sound like intimate confessions, thereby creating the necessary musical urgency: "Everyone should be clear about what happens in the Fifth. The jubilation is produced under duress, as if someone were to beat us whit a cudgel and at the same time say 'you should rejoice, you shoud rejoice'. And the maltreated person rises, though his legs can barely hold him, and marches round murmuring 'we should rejoice, we should rejoice'." (Shostakovich) With his Fifth Symphony Shostakovich succeeded in placing artistic conformity against resistance in a kind of balancing act. He had escaped the agonies of concentration camp life and death, but the inner desperation, the hell of fear, still remained to be overcome. This took place in the Symphony no. 6 in B minor op. 54, composed between April and October 1939 and premiered by Evgeny Mravinsky with the Leningrad Philharmonic in the same year. Shostakovich had carefully prepared the way for the event by denying any hint of an "inner" programme and letting it be known that he was planning a work dedicated to Lenin. The reactions at the first performance on November 5, 1939 were thus understandable. The official press was disappointed and confused. The three-movement symphony begins, in contravention of the rule, not with an Allegro but with a Largo expressing sorrow over the people who disappeared in Stalin's camps, murdered in the name of "a better future". External expressive devices are lacking; instead, an internal harmonic tension prevails and the music gradually fades out. Both the number of instruments and the volume at which they are to play are progressively reduced. The second and third movements contrast most strongly with this. Here the way of the world is represented by evil laughter and lively figure work. The coda realizes what the close of the fifth symphony had only suggested: concentrated supernatural materialization. "The thought of waiting to be executed is something that has tortured me throughout my life. Many pages of my music speak of it," confessed Shostakovich. So too with the Sixth Symphony. Trascending the special circumstances of its conception, it presents a musical picture of man's fear of death generally and of rebellion. Roshdestvensky lays the interpretative emphasis on the striking depiction of the forced clowning of life. The Symphony no. 9 in E flat major op. 70 was composed immediately after the end of the war, during July/August 1945. A victory symphony was expected of Shostakovich. The first performance on November 3, 1945, was therefore a fiasco, since the composer had departed from the Beethoven model of a powerful Ninth and, far worse, had omitted to pay homage to the "Leader of the people", its "dear father" Stalin. Instead, the Ninth Symphony contains a charming musical examination of the century's "stride of uniformity" - the march. The march appears as the symbol of conformism, "conformism as the mortal sin of modern man" (Hannah Arendt). Grotesques suddenly change into military marches, which in turn become circus music and scherzando episodes. Gifted with wit, humour and irony, Rozhdestvensky is absolutely in his element here. In November 1982, in one of his now legendary series of concerts in Moscow presenting modern Russian composers, he declared the ninth Symphony to be one of the most important works in all Russian music: "Written at a difficult time, directly after the end of the war, its cheerfulness and shrewdness are in many ways reminiscent of Haydn and Mozart. But the wounds which the war had caused were not yet healed, they still hurt, and we hear the screams of pain - in the fourth movement of the symphony, in the urgent bassoon monologue." Sigrid Neef (Transl.: J & M Berridge)