Luogo e data di registrazione		Moscow: - 1982 (Op. 21) - 1983 (Opp. 46 & 141) - 1985 (Op. 135) - 1986 (Op. 62a) - 1989 (8 English and American Folk Songs)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Recording Engineers		Igor Veprintsev (Opp. 21, 46 & 62a), Severin Pazhukin (Opp. 135, 141 & 8 English and American Folk Songs)
	Prime Edizioni LP		Melodiya
	Edizione CD		BMG Classics "2 CD Twofer" 74231 59057 2 | 2 CD - 74' 31" - 75' 21" | (c) 1998 | (p) 1983, 1984, 1986, 1991 | DDD/ADD°
	Note		Front cover: F. Vallotton, "Frozen canal and bridge near the Heremitage of St. Petersburg", 1913

"I am dying because I cannot live without love" The premiere of the 14th Symphony op. 135 in 1969 caused a sensation in Moscow. A generally taboo subject had been made the subject pf public deliberation: death. It was only ten years later that Rozhdestvensky ventured to perform this outstanding work, conducting it for the first time in  1979 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Manchester. Shostakovich himself had turned to the phenomenon of death at an early stage and devoted a number of chamber-music works to the subject since the Thirties. In the 14th Symphony, however, he made death the central theme in the form of destructive force. In 1968 the Prague Spring had withered in the icy breath of the Brezhnev doctrine. The 14th Symphony is a cycle of eleven songs (on texts by various poets of different eras) for soprano and baritone, small string orchestra and percussion, in which the music retains an intimate dimension while simultaneously capable of expressive, eruptive outbursts. The old second-interval lamentation motif is omnipresent, as is a theme derived from the Dies irae (the day of wrath in the medieval requiem). This leads into the symphony and introduces the tenth movement, thereby forming a circle. The eight song takes the place of the traditional scherzo: a dictator is mocked (reply of the Zaporogian Cossacks to the Sultan of Constantinople by Guillaume Apollinaire). The scherzo is followed by the lament, for banishment is the poet's lot (O Delvig, Delvig! by Wilhelm Küchelbecker). Through the last two poems (by Rainer Maria Rilke) the phenomenon of death is elevated to the level of a general tragedy. The last words of the symphony are: "Death is great / We are his / With a laughing mouth. / When we think we're in the prime of life / He dares to cry / In our midst." European civilisation is becoming an ant-like activity, seeking to avoid thoughts of death, and for this reason this symphony has earned a special status. Shostakovich composed Six Romances to texts by Japanese poets Op. 21 for tenor and orchester between 1928 and 1932. They were not premiered until April 24, 1966 in Leningrad and Rozhdestvensky conducted them for the first time in 1980 in London. These romances are dedicated to Nina Varsar, whom Shostakovich passionately pursued and married in 1932. For the successful composer who until then had only concentrated on his work, love for this beautiful and self-assured woman brought Shostakovich his first experience of how passion can sometimes fail. The first three texts are from an anthology of Japanese lyric poetry published in 1912 in St Petersburg which Igor Stravinsky had used in 1912/13 for his Three Japanese Songs. The tonal space remains unspecified, indeed vague, in this cycle, with the vocal part characterized by restrained expressivity. This is no light-hearted, rejoicing "Love" (no. 1). Even the admission of joy is articulated in a tragic minor key. The second romance ("Before the suicide") is of linear stringency. Only the wild and onomatopoeic imitated scream of passing wild geese pulls everything up short, since this cry will survive beyond death. The xylophone imagines "dark dreams" and is to be found frequently in this guise in Shostakovich's works. There follows an impressionistic homage to the wind, allowing an "Indiscret look" (no. 3) at the girls' legs. This image of light-hearted sensuality is followed by the metaphors of passionate union ("For the first and last time", no. 4), while wan strings introduce "Death" (no. 6). What remains is a lonely, plaintive voice: "I am dying because I cannot live without love". This dependence on the love of his nearest and dearest, manifested here for the first time in textual and musical terms, was to be a constant source of joy and fear in Shostakovich's life; it dominates his oeuvre in equal measure with the fear of social repression. This is also subject of the Four Romances after Pushkin op. 46, composed at the end of 1936. Originally planned as a cycle of six romances to mark the centenary in  1937 of the poet's death, the four romances which were eventually finished were only premiered in 1940, since the cultural bureaucracy had fatefully interfered in  Shostakovich's life in 1936 and banned some of his works. The first romance takes this conflict as its theme: Vozrozhdeniye (rebirth). This is meant literally (and not, as some translations would have us believe, as a representation of the cultural Renaissance eraI. Pushkin puts forward the thesis that art barbarians may be able to destroy a painting by a genius, but that it remains in the memory, to be recalled in their minds, being as it were spiritually reborn. Shostakovich could identify fully with this statement, since he had had to withdraw the premiere of his fourth symphony, a fact which remained unforgotten in the consciousness of the music-loving public, so that the work, "destroyed" by a Party decree, was eventually able to experience a triuphant rebirth decades later. "Weeping bitterly, the jealous girl scolds the boy", is how the second romance begins. However, when the boy's head sinks wearily onto the girl's shoulder she smiles happily and she cries only softly. The lovers' tiff ends in reconciliation, the painful lamentation motif in seconds giving way to a calming stillness. "Black storm clouds are again ahnging threateningly above me" (no. 3: Premonition). In the battle between the artist and the power of the state there is only a temporary armistice, according to Pushkin, and similarly with Shostakovich. Intervals of fourths build up before memory of the loved one brings release, brightness and light. Readers will search in vain for the title Stanzas in Pushkin's brilliant verses of the fourth romance because the poem is unnamed: "Brozhu li ya vdol' ulits shumnykh" (Whether I wander through the noise of the lanes). The poet was thirty years old when he wrote this poem in 1829 and Shostakovich was the same age when, in 19366, he set it to music. This is no coincidence. In both there is an expression of existential experience of transitoriness: of fame, art, love. The last of the romances is the best of this cycle from a musical point of view; perhaps it is even a key work in the whole of Shostakovich's entire oeuvre. Gennady Rozhdestvensky orchestrated the songs which were originally written for piano accompaniment and premiered his version in Moscow in 1982. The 15th Symphony op. 141, Shostakovich's last, was composed in 1971 and is a masterpiece by a fatally sick man. The first three movements remind us of the turbulence of life. The first movement, described by Shostakovich as a "toy shop" introduces a wealth of fleet and commonplace topics including the head motif of Rossini's William Tell overture, which is constantly repeated. The fate motif from Richard Wagner's The Valkyrie, intertwined with the "love, suffering and longing motif" from Tristan und Isolde dominates and structures the last movement. In the finale motives from the composer's own early works are quoted, especially from those which had been regulated and forbidden, such as the percussion interlude from his opera The Nose of 1928 and the notorius trombone glissandi imitating sexual union from the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk banned in 1936. The close proximity of innocuous gaiety and deathly seriousness shocked the audience at the 1972 premiere in Moscow. Gennady Roshdestvensky conducted the symphony in the same year; both then and later he did not soften the musical allusions, preferring to give them pride of place. This lends presence and emphasis to the banal figures of the first movements, crowing with the Rossini quote, while giving weight to all the sounds which are the harbingers of the sombre fate motif from the Valkyries. "Only the doomed deserve my gaze: ho who looks upon me takes leave of the light of life", is Wagner's parallel passage. Unlike the great old master of Russian conducting, Mravinsky, Rozhdestvensky does not develop the coda, with its pedal point in the strings, into a "musica angelica". Bells, xylophone and celesta conjure up a soft, yet relentless time-count: the ticking of an expiring clock. The Six Romances to texts by Raleigh, Burns and Shakespeare, op. 62 were written in 1942 in Kuybyshev (now Samara), to where Shostakovich had been evacuated during the Leningrad blockade. The first three romances were actually premiered in Kuybyshev, with Shostakovich himself at the piano, on November 4, 1942, while the entire cycle was first premiered on June 6, 1943 in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory (again with the composer at the keyboard). Shostakovich completed a version for large orchestra (op. 62a) in 1943 which was however never played in his lifetime and which is to be heard on the present recording. The chamber-orchestra version (op. 140) composed in 1971 was premiered in Moscow on November 30, 1973. In Samuil Marshak and Boris Pasternak, Shostakovich had found the best possible translators of the English texts. The romance To the Son (2:5, Walter Raleigh) warns of allowing three things to unite: wood, a rope and a scoundrel. Perhaps the son himself was the scoundrel, hanged on the gallows for "higher ends". To denounce someone as a scoundrel was certainly a common practice both in Elizabethan England and in the Societ era, and remains so to this day the world over. Shostakovich dedicated the romance to his friend, the composer Lev Atovmyan (1901-1973). In Robert Burns' On Snowcovered fields (2:6) one person assures another that he will support him no matter what the weather, in snow, wind or rain, persecution or any other need. The composer dedicated this romance to his first wife Mina (who died in 1954). MacPherson's farewell (2:7, Robert Burns) is an ironical paraphrase about death. MacPherson, never one to miss a battle, goes willingly to his execution. Shostakovich had this to say about the topic: "The poet Shoshchenko said that if someone writes ironically about death, then he loses his fear of it. For a while I agreed with Shoshchenko, I even wrote a romance about it called MacPherson before his execution (...). But later I realized that even Shoshchenko could not liberate himself from the fear of death. (...) And so my attitude to this problem changed." The romance is dedicated to Isaak Glikmann. Jenny (2:8, Burns) is an ironic tale of a courtship and dedicated to Shostakovich's friend and fellow-composer Yuri (Georgy) Sviridov (1915-1998). The focal point of the cycle is the fifth romance (2:9), the setting of William Shakespeare's 66th Sonnet, dedicated to the brilliant aesthetician and friend of Shostakovich, Ivan Sollertinsky (1902-1944). Sustained chords in the strings and the sound of bells conjure up the dull passing of time: "Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry ... And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd, (...) And art made tonguetied by authority, And folly - doctor-like - controlling skill, (...) Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone." The finale (2:10) is provided by the English children's song Royal Procession: "The King of France went up the hill with twenty thousand men, / The King of France came down the hill and never went up again." (Marshak: Po sklonu vverkh korol' povel polki svoikh strelkov. Po sklonu vniz korol' soshol, no tol'ko bez polkov.) Shostakovich dresses the biting wit in a sharp allegretto tempo and polka mode. This time the dedicatee is another fellow-composer, Vissaryon Shebalin (1902-1963). Rozhdestvensky conducted the cycle for the first time in 1978 in Austria. The Setting of Eight English and American Folk Songs was probably written in 1944. Ever since the premiere in 1942 of his colossal anti-war symphony, the seventh, Shostakovich had become the most popular of all Russian composers abroad. After the work's American premiere in July 1942 under Arturo Toscanini there were a further 60 performances on the American continent (in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay and Peru) and this was the reason why Shostakovich turned to arranging folk songs, as a way of expressing the fraternal unity of all peoples. Sigrid Neef (Transl.: J & M Berridge)