Luogo e data di registrazione		Moscow: - 1984 (Opp. 60 & 58a) - 1983 (Op. 65)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Recording Engineers		Igor Veprintsev (Opp. 60 & 58a), Severin Pazhukin (Op. 65)
	Prime Edizioni LP		Melodiya
	Edizione CD		BMG Classics "2 CD Twofer" 74231 53457 2 | 2 CD - 75' 00" - 75' 36" | (c) 1998 | (p) 1984, 1986, 1987 | DDD
	Note		Front cover: F. Vallotton, "Frozen canal and bridge near the Heremitage of St. Petersburg", 1913

"Music... it's able to express everything without a single word!" Hardly any other symphony of the 20th century has become as popular and yet remained as unknown, in spite of its apparent unambiguity, as the Leningrad Symphony by Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975). Gennady Rozhdestvensky has only added it quite late to his repertoire. The first time he cunducted Shostakovich was in 1952 (First Symphony). Then, after the sensational success of the 9th Symphony with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1958, he swiftly included further symphonies into his repertoire. Yet it was as late as 1967 that he first conducted the Leningrad Symphony, actually at a concert with the USSR RTV Large Symphony Orchestra at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow. By then he had good reasons to assume, that the Seventh Symphony would not only be seens as an anti-war symphony, but understood to have a deeper underlying meaning that finally could be conveyed and perceived. The Seventh Symphony has become a symbol of monumantal war and funeral music. This is certainly due to the circumstances of its genesis and circulation. Though Shostakovich had started to compose it in the summer of 1941, while Leningrad was besieged by German fascist troops, it had its première on 5 March 1942 in the remote Kuybyshev (today renamed into Samara), to which a lot of artists had been evacuated. Its music seemed to symbolise the heroic determination to fight and survive. As such it was not only perceived and enthusiastically celebrated in the Soviet Union but also throughout Western Europe. Conductors such as Arturo Toscanini, Artur Rodzinski, and Dmitry Mitropoulus counted it an honour to perform it. It was in keeping with the spirit of the time. The composer himself honoured it, on the occasion of the première, by publishing some programmatic annotations in the Pravda. Only when Shostakovich's reputation as a completely loyal composer was demystified through Solomon Volkov's book Svidetelstvo (testimony), a new interpretation of this symphony became possible. This was not only true for the Soviet union, but also for the Western World and had become necessary, because the Soviet Union had transformed from a war victim into an aggressor in the meantime. Shostakovich has dedicated his work to Leningrad. But this city, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn has pointed out in his book The Gulag Archipelago, has served to populate the "Kolyma", the Stalinist extermination camp in the 1930s. Solzhenitsyn reduced it to the following formula: "Leningrad was deported from Leningrad", in fact by its own people and in peacetime! Neither does the writer blame the horrendous number of death on Hitler alone, but also on those "who raked in their salaries for a decade and knew of Leningrad's exposed position", but did not do anything to protect the city. Soviet bureaucracy and Hitler resulted in the disaster of the blockade of Leningrad. Shostakovich's ymphony bears witness to this gruesome pact between normal everyday indolence and extraordinary criminals, especially in the first and last movement. Their unusual quality does not lie so much in clearly relating and confronting song-like themes about patriotism and the love of peace with march-like themes of the enemy and the threat they constitute. Rather their most outstanding characteristic is the general ambiguity of all themes and motifs as well as the musical emancipation of triviality. Rozhdestvensky brings out the details succinctly and bitingly. In musical leterature, the succession of variations in the first movement, a monotonous "march motif", which repeats itself eleven times, has been erroneously interpreted as "a theme about the invasion of the enemies". After its first appearance this theme is delicately stippled by the violins and violas playing pizzicato and pianissimo. Then it develops progressively into a somewhat "indecent chanson" accompanied by roaring trombones. In the background Rozhdestvensky creates the impression of dancing skeletons: with the rattling noise of violin chords beaten by the bow stick. An impressive fortissimo opposes the absolute stupidity of the trivial evil to gestures of protest. The recapitulation begins with an Adagio (solo bassoon) in the style of a requiem. In the fourth movement, the separated spheres of public and private life merge: a jubilation machinery begins to work, soon interrupted by passages of funeral music. Here we find an allegory of one of the fundamental experiences of this century; the simultanelty of state ordered optimism and individual grief. The two central movements don't present a contrasting idyllic scenery. In the second movement the music seems to hold its breath, fear is presented as a fundamental form of existence. The third movement is based on the sharp tension between "funebre" and "doloroso". It is dominated by the deep register, by sonorities based on fourths and fifths. Everything here expresses repressed feelings, until string cantilenas permit the grief articulate itself. Especially Rozhdestvensky's interpretations of the outer movements are noteworthy. He has discovered the Seventh Symphony for his generation, for those who grew up with the lies of the former generation. For this reason he allows for the turmoils of survival in a pining and agony-stricken society. With the same orchestra as before, Rozhdestvensky conducted the Eighth Symphony for the first time in Moscow in 1965. The symphony had had its Moscow première on 4 November 1943, in honour of the Soviet government and under the impression that the battle of Stalingrad signified the turn of the war. Since the international success of his Seventh Symphony, Shostakovich had advanced to the most famous Soviet composer, not to mention the most lucrative one. The CBS, for example, has paid 10,000 dollars to the Soviet Union for the performing rights of the Eighth Symphony. The opinion about the Moscow première was divided. People had expected a heroic and patriotic symphony by Shostakovich. Instead they heard a first movement which lasted nearly half an hour, with a disturbing lamentation, followed by two strange masquerade.like movements and a Largo using the old passacaglia form. The work ended with a fifth movement containing a finale "senza animando" and "morendo". One heard a poem of grief. In a creative retrospect from 1946 the composer said: "I wanted to depict the emotional state of someone who has been stunned by the hammer of war. This person has to face agonising trials and catastrophes. His path is neither a bed of roses nor accompanied by cheerful drummers..." Of course such a programme wasn't to the taste of the official Moscow of 1943. Thus the absurd attempt was made to give the symphony the epithet "Stalingrad". But even then there were people who understood Shostakovich's message, like the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who wrote the following about the première of the Eighth Symphony: "...all of a sudden the voice of the antique chorus of Greek tragedy resounded. Music is so much at the advantage, it can express everything without uttering a single word." Evgeny Mravinsky, whom the 8th Symphony was dedicated to, and who conducted its première, had already interpreted the third movement as parable of blind raging fate. Rozhdestvensky followed his example in this respect. He, too, created an oppressive study about the impotence of the individual, one of the other basic experience of the 20th century. In monotonous industriousness a "voice" plods and stumbles around all by itself, as if ordered about by chordal whip-lashes and shrill entries of the winds. One voice turns into many, victoriously a trumpet triumphs. After writhing with pain the lamentation of the Largo resounds: twelve variations of a nine-bar bass theme. Rozhdestvensky turns them into a study about the mercilessness of time. Maybe one of the most impressive sections is the "standstill of time", the total disintegration of form at the end of the symphony, a disturbing act, which has an existential as well as a social meaning: dying, end of time, devastation. The songs for Sjakespeare's King Lear were written for a performance at the Grand Dramatic Theatre of Leningrad (director: Georgi Kozinstsev) in 1940. During the Stalin era a production of Shakespeare was by no means a matter of course. The composer reports: "Everybody knows that our best Lear was Mikhoëls from the Yiddish Theatre. And, everybody knows how he died, a dreadful end. And what happened to Pasternak, our best Shakespeare translator? These names symbolise tragedies, which are more tragic than anything tragic in Shakespeare's pieces. No, its much better to have nothing to do with Shakespeare. Only very careless people get involved in such a suicide mission. This Shakespeare is highly explosive." Salomon Mikhoëls (1890-1948), actor and founder of the Yiddish Theatre in Moscow, was killed on orders of the party, the deed disguised as an act of criminals. The Yiddish Theatre was closed in 1949. Between 1936 and 1943 Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was hardly published in Russia and had to earn his living doing translations. The fact that Rozhdestvensky was able to record Shostakovich's Lear-music in Moscow in 1984 was only possible due to Evgeni Nesterenko's help. Born in 1938, this bass singer is one of the most distinguished interpreters of Russian classical art. apart from that, he has indomitably supported Shostakovich's works. Amongst others, he was the first to perform the vocal part of the politically loaded Michelangelo suite and the Four Poems of Captain Lebedyakin. Furthermore, he included the Ten Buffon's Songs into his concert repertoire. But although their texts are from Shakespeare's Lear, the poet Samuil Marshak (1887-1964) has modified them so strongly according to Russian sentiment, that one has to consider them more or less as free adaptations. Shostakovich completely restrains himself and his music is accentuated on ly by scarce means. Cordelia's ballad introduces the composition like a motto. It describes an empty house, which had been inhabited once. Buffeted by Thunder, while haunted by Merlin, the magician, it remains silent and empty. This corresponded with the situation of many families during the great waves of deportation. Shostakovich has accompanied the ballad with a low sustaining rhythm, resembling ghosts riding through the night. This musical motif signals threat and hope at the same time. It is also present in the fool's songs. The sequence of the songs follows a well-considered dramaturgy. Over and over again the factual case Lear becomes the object of ridicule (1, 5, 7, 8). People lament that wise men become fools, thereby putting fools out of work (2). Incidents from the animal kingdom serve to illustrate human nature (3, 4). The fool's prophecy (Lear: III, 3) and his résumé about friendship and foolishness (II, 4) summarises the tragedy and constitutes its climax. Stalin's apprehensions concerning Shakespeare were well founded, for the prophecy says: If the judges would punish those, who are really guilty for a change, the state would get out of joint, but one would be able to hold up one's head at last. Shostakovich saw himself as "yurodivi", as holy simpleton, who was traditionally entitled to speak the truth in Russia. The composer used this right in his songs. Sigrid Neef (Transl.: A. Hofmann)