Luogo e data di registrazione		Moscow: - 1983 (Opp. 91 & 103) - 1984 (Op. 23) - 1986 (Op. 93)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Recording Engineers		Severin Pazhukin (Opp. 93 & 23), Edward Shakhnazaryan (Op. 103), Igor Veprintsev (Op. 91)
	Prime Edizioni LP		Melodiya
	Edizione CD		BMG Classics "2 CD Twofer" 74231 63461 2 | 2 CD - 66' 17" - 69' 42" | (c) 1999 | (p) 1983, 1985, 1987 | DDD/ADD*
	Note		Front cover: Natalya Gontcharova, "Fresh-fallen Snow", 1911

Pushkin as a Travelling Companion Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony in E minor op. 93 was written in the summer of 1953, shortly after the death of Stalin on 5 March 1953. It was completed on 25 October and performed for the first time in Leningrad on 17 December under Yevgeny Mravinsky. according to the composer's own testimony, it evokes the Stalinist era, anathematising that age and at the same time seeking to lay the tyrant's ghost. The dictator himself may have been dead, but the repressive system that he had created continued to exist; his reign of terror was not yet over; and people continued suffer as before. The opening Moderato owes its lamento-like character to a quotation from the composer's Eighth Symphony, a work dedicated both to the victims of state oppression and to Mravinsky, who was a personal friend of Shostakovich's. In the second movement, pounding rhythms, shrill breaks (here used in the sense of short unaccompanied passages in jazz) and strident orchestra tutti conjure up the picture of a typical Asiatic despot. (Shostakovich claimed that this Allegro is a portrait of Stalin.) The main theme is a quotation from the scene in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov in which the populace is herded together and made to pay tribute to its new ruler. Shostakovich regarded this opera as an exceptionally faithful and intelligent account of the relationship between rulers and ruled. According to Mussorgsky and Pushkin (it was on the latter's historical tragedy of the same name that Mussorgsky based his libretto), nothing can justify the blood guilt of those who hold the reins of power. The last two movements mark the stages in an individual's life when he is destroyed and degraded but also when he discovers his own sense of identity. (Shostakovich gave human shape to this particular individual by means of his own initials, D-Es-C-H, which can be respelt using the German system of notation as D-E flat-C-B.) It was not only a question of exorcising the evil spirit of Stalinism but also of breaking free from a state of immaturity that may not have been his own fault but which (to use a phrase of Kant's) was none the less "self-inflicted". In short, Shostakovich sought to break out of the vicious circle of subjection, subordination and blindness. In the final movement the composer's signature returns, now embedded in shrill-sounding "circus music" in a deafening unisono, before the funeral music of the recapitulation enters. In March and April 1954 the Union of Soviet Composers met to consider how best to respond to Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, and at the end of its three-day session rebranded the composer an "enemy of the people". By now, however, his opponents - the champions of "Socialist Realism" - had lost their position of power and it was not long before it became clear that the outlawed composer could begin to look forward to his rehabilitation. Gennady Rozhdestvensky belongs to the generation of Russians who grew up in the shadow of the Terror. He soon took the Tenth Symphony into his repertory, performing it for the first time with the Moscow Philharmonic in 1955, when he was still only twenty-four years old. He approached this music mindful of Bertolt Brecht's dictum that the womb from which this dictatorship crawled has not lost its ability to bear children. Shostakovich's Four Romances op. 46 date from 1936/37 and were his first settings of poems by Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837). Fifteen years later, in October 1952, he wrote his Four Monologues op. 91 within the space of a mere four days. Another fifteen years were to pass before his final setting of a poem by Pushkin, Spring, Spring op. 128, which dates from August 1967. These settings thus reflect three stages in the composer's life when, profoundly demoralised, he turned to poetry in an attempt to ward off despair. And in Pushkin's verse he found the supreme expression of existential experiences of transience, fame, artistic pride and the consolation afforded by love. Originally set for voice and piano, these songs were later orchestrated by Gennady Rozhdestvensky and introduced to Moscow audiences in 1982. The soloist was Anatoli Safiulin. The Monologues are less emotionally charged than the Romances but tend to be pensive and restrained, ending on a note of serene composure with no. 4, "Farewell", an admission of the transiet nature of our lives. In "Fragment" (no. 1) the everyday life of a Jewish family is seen to symbolise a life beset by fear. The father reads the Bible, the mother prepares a meal and the daughter cries over an empty cradle.The bells in the town begin to toll the midnight hour, but sleep continues to shun this outcast family. There is a knock at the door and a stranger enters. At this point the monologue ends. For Shostakovich and thousands of his fellow Russuans, waiting to be arrested by Stalin's henchmen, who invariably arrived at midnight or at dawn, this was an elemental fact of life. "What is my name for you?" (no. 2) is an attempt on this poet's part to assure himself of his own innate merits and dignity, qualities that no one else needs by way of confirmation. "In the depth of Siberian ores" (no. 3) contains a clear political message as well as a pointer to Shostakovich's own life. His grandfather and great-grandfather were both of Polish extraction and were exiled to Siberia by the tsar on account of their political activities. Pushkin expresses the certain knowledge that the word "freedom" is noempty illusion, lending the hackneyed and much-abused term its ancient dignity and meaning and taking its part in the face of attempts by those in power to subvert that essential meaning. The title of Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony in G minor op. 103 - "The Year 1905" - refers to an historical event, the massacre of peaceful demonstrators in St Petersburg on the orders of the tsar on Bloody Sunday, 9 January 1905. The events of 1956/57, when the symphony was written, seemed to the composer to invite this parallel. Al the people whom the victors refuse to honour. "It is still the victor who writes the history of the defeated," wrote Brecht in Die Verurteilung des Lukullus. "The club-wielding victor distorts the features of the man that he clubs to death. The weaker man quits the world, and all that remains is a lie." Shostakovich wrote his Eleventh Symphony in the language and from the perspective of the victims. This emerges with particular force from his treatment of his themes, which are borrowed from well-known folksongs and revolutionary songs, including thye funeral anthem You Fell Victims in The Fateful Struggle and the marching songs Bravely in Step, Comrades and The Girl from Warsaw. In Soviet Russia, these were officially sanctioned songs designed to uphold tradition. But just as in real life the ideals of the Revolution were misused and distorted by the country's rulers, so they now sound shrill, harsh and dissonant in Shostakovich's hands, before seeming to cry out for help, but returning in all their former glory, as if these songs had a soul. The symphony's four movements can be interpreted from the standpoint of outward events. The hollow fourths and fifths of the opening movement ("The Palace Square") suggest silence and coldness - a large empty space, while the mounting tension of the second movement ("The Ninth of January") could be an attempt to describe a crowd of people gathering, with the salvos on the percussion that fill the sudden silence (a fermata in the orchestra) imitating the sound of gunshots. In this apparently unambiguously historical second movement, however, Shostakovich has included a self-quotation from one of his Ten Choral Poems on Revolutionary Texts of 1951, in which we encounter the lines: "Look around you, Grandpa Tsar, thanks to your servants we have no lives left, we have nothing at all". The third movement ("In memoriam") consists of an ostinato variation on the funeral anthem You Fell Victims in the Fateful Struggle, heard first on the violas and suggesting the sort of music that might accompany a funeral procession, while the final movement ("Tocsin"), in which two revolutionary songs, Rage, you Tyrants and The Girl from Warsaw, are combined together, might be taken to depict the workers" struggle against their oppressors. But things are not quite so straightforward as this- Shostakovich's symphony does not simply set out to describe historical events but examines the impoverishment of the spirit that is always bound up with tyranny and that leads history to repeat itself. "Our family discussed the Revolution pf 1905 constantly," Shostakovich told Solomon Volkov. "I think that it was a turning point - the people stopped believing in the tsar. (...) But a lot of blood must be shed for that. In 1905 they were carting a mound of murdered children on a sleigh. The boys had been sitting in the trees, looking at the soldiers, and the soldiers shot them - just like that, for fun. (...) I think that many things repeat themselves in Russian history. (...) I wanted to show this recurrence in the Eleventh Symphony. I wrote it in 1957 and it deals with contemporary themes even though it's called 1905. It's about the people, who have stopped believing because the cup of evil has run over." This loss of faith led inexorably to violence and to the constant recurrence of violence. The opera Der arme Kolumbus by the German composer Erwin Dressel (1909-1972) received its first performance at Kassel in 1928. Shostakovich's finale to the opera owes its existence to the work's Soviet première at the Maly Theatre in Leningrad in 1929, when the piece was staged in modern dress. Shostakovich was working closely with the company at this time, helping to prepare the first performance of his own opera, The Nose, and was asked to write the music for a new epilogue and for the cartoon film that was to accompany it. Its title was "What does modern America represent?" In order to understand the work, one needs to know Shostakovich's comments on the sequence of shots in the film: "Armoured cruiser, ships, airplanes", "The picture contracts to a dot", "The dot turns into a dollar", "Gunshots", "The cost of the war effort in the USA" and so on. The next sequences appear under the motto "Rejection of war. All decide to take the road to peace" and are accompanied by a choral appeal: "Mir! Mir! Mezhdunarodny mir" (Peace! Peace! International Peace!). For the sequence appearing beneath the title "Arrival of the Yankees", Shostakovich used a trumpet tune that he was to recycle in 1933 in the final movement of his First Piano Concerto op. 35. This is an occasional composition, an example of functional music. For a long time the score was believed to be lost until it was rediscovered by Gennady Rozhdestvensky and given its first performance in concert form in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic on 1 February 1981. Sigrid Neef (Transl.: GB)