Luogo e data di registrazione		Moscow: - 1962 (Op. 32) - 1983 (Op. 20) - 1984 (Op. 14) - 1985 (Op. 43) Leningrad: - 1979 (Op. 23)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Recording Engineers		Severin Pazhukin (Opp. 14, 20 & 43), Alexander Grosmann (Op. 32), Igor Veprintsev (Op. 23)
	Prime Edizioni LP		Melodiya
	Edizione CD		BMG Classics "2 CD Twofer" 74231 63462 2 | 2 CD - 76' 12" - 69' 43" | (c) 1999 | (p) 1962, 1980, 1985-1987 | DDD/ADD*
	Note		Front cover: Wassili Dmitryevich Polenov, "The Winter", 1880

A miniature "Hamletiade" It was during the early 1980s that Gennady Rozhdestvensky began his complete recording of the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), while at the same time performing apparently lesser works such as indicental music and soundtracks. Suddenly the early symphonies appeared in a new light: only now was it possible to see that the formal experiments of the Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies were inspired by the grand vision of such pioneering directors as Vakhtangov, Meyerhold and Taïrov, all of whom sought to renew the language of art through the spirit of the Revolution - what they called "October in the theatre". Shortly after the overwhelming international success of his First Symphony in 1926, the then twenty-one-year-old composer was commissioned to write a new symphony by the music division of the Soviet State Publishing Company. Under the terms of his contract, he was required to write a piece commemorating the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The result was his Second Symphony in B major op. 14, a work constructed along traditional dramaturgical lines with its idea of night giving way to day - per aspera ad astra. The opening is dominated by a sense of sombre chaos, after which musical impulses start to form, held together - as it were - by a trumpet tune and finally achoeving a sense of radiant order. Unusual - at least for a Soviet commission - is the musical style, a style which, with its linearity, atonality, athematicism and arhythmical structures, found the composer very much abreast of his times. At the start of the final chorus, a siren is called on to evoke the symphony's sphere of reference, namely, the municipal world of work. The use of such sirens was by no means unusual in works of this period, but here it serves to signal a particular tryth - that the October Revolution banked almost solely on the workers. To dismiss the farmworkers as an irrelevance was a basic error of Communism and, indeed, of the age as a whole, obsessed, as it was, with the chimera of industrialisation. By contrast, Shostakovich managed to avoid committing another of the basic follies of his age. His depiction of mass actions (at the start of the Largo, for example, the image of crowds converging is conjured up by means of scalar figures on the strings rising up pianissimo from their very lowest register) never becomes a mere glorification of the masses. On the contrary, the middle section of this movement (an Allegro molto) is a trio for solo violin, bassoon and clarinet, in which intimacy and amity gain the upper hand. Just as at the beginning the strings rise up from the depths, so in the final chorus the voices emerge from silence. The text is treated in a declamatory manner and ends in a brief spoken chorus. The first part looks back to the past: "We went and asked for work and bread", while the second part brings insight: "We understood Lenin, that our fate has a name: Struggle." In the final section the work becomes openly programmatical: "Look, the banner, October, Communism and Lenin." The straightforwardness and serene objectivity of the October Symphony were in stark contrast to the romantic euphoria and pomp of the actual celebrations held to mark the Revolution's tenth anniversary - in this respect, nothing has changed. First heard in Leningrad in 1927, the work soon vanished from Soviet concert halls and was not restored to the repertory until the end of the 1960s. The thirdt Symphony in E flat major op. 30 ("The First of May") received its first performance on 21 January 1930, only three days after Shostakovich's first opera, The Nose, had been unveiled. The Leningrad Philharmonic was conducted by Alexander Gauk. Here was a work in which, to quote the composer himself, "not a single theme was repeated". A single-movement piece, it ends with a chorus inspired, in part, by Beethoven's Choral Fantasy. (The year 1927 was marked by large-scale celebrations to commemorate the centenary of Beethoven's death.) Shostakovich creates the atmosphere of a street carnival, together with the Dynamism and emotionalism of popular speakers and the lively throng of a milling crowd. It was Meyerhold, after all, who had argued that the true home of art was the street. There is something both theatrical and cinematic about this symphony, with its rapid changes of musical perspective and its abrupt fading in and out of individual episodes, from march to waltz and from thrusting belligerence to a cheeky grace and hesitant groping forward. In the Andante-Largo section, the Tuba mirum interpolation and wide-ranging dialogue between trumpet on the one hand and the dissenting voices of cellos and basses on the other have an oddly retardative effect. This is no glittering celebration that passes off with military smoothness, but a barbed occasion at best. This symphony, too, was accused of formalism and, like its contemporaries, was not revived until after 1964, in the wake of the rehabilitation of the composer's early works. Shostakovich's incidental music for Hamlet was written in 1932 for a production at Mosvow's Vakhtangov Theatre. The highly gifted and perceptive director Nikolai Akimov (1901-1968) saw the play as a tragicomic struggle for survival within a corrupt and despotic system. In this he could appeal to Shakespeare, although the affinities with his own age and country could hardly be overlooked. His Hamlet, like Shakespeare's, was no aesthete but an overweight, beer-swilling glutton who has faked the legend of his father's ghost in order to bolster his own position and give him a hold over the new king. Ophelia, too, has an eye on the throne and is drowned when legless with vodka. The main character was the informer Polonius, a parody of Stanislavsky, bombastically garrulous and completely above all everyday cares. The production was banned and all that has survived is Shostakovich's score. The Hamler Suite for small orchestra op. 32 is of inspired simplicity, brevity and lightness, a Russian answer to Offenbach, suggesting glittering ceremonies and raucous enjoyment on the brink of the abyss. By the end of 1929 Stalin had succeeded in removing all his political opponents from the Party leadership and in 1930 the Sixteenth Party Congress voted for industrialisation along the lines that he demanded. The state's capacity for terrirising its citizens could so easily become a reality and be celebrated with glittering pomp. Societ Russia, too, was on the brink of the abyss. Shostakovich was confronted with Shakespeare's tragedy for a second time in his career when his friend and patron, the theatrical genius Vsevolod Meyerhold, embarked on plans of his own to stage the play in Moscow. In his production, Hamlet was to be played by two different actors in order to bring out the conflict between the hero's tragic and comic aspects. In this case, the production did not even proceed beyond the planning stage. More than thirty years later, Shostakovich wrote the soundtrack for Grigori Kozintsev's film version of the play, a version that won an award at the 1964 Venice Film Festival and one, moreover, which in spite of its traditional characterisation, is full of contemporary references. By a curious coincidence, Gennady Rozhdestvensky had recorded Shostakovich's 1932 Hamlet Suite only two years earlier, in 1962. The play still seemed to have plenty to say to the Soviet Union of the 1960s, as the self-styled "Heirs of the Vakhtangov Theatre" staged their own Hamlet at this time, with the legendary Vladimir Vysotsky in the title role in Yuri Lyubimov's modern-dress productionat the Taganka Theatre. With his Fourth Symphony in C minor op. 43 - composed between September 1935 and May 1936 . Shostakovich broke free from the optimistic belief in the future implied by his previous symphonies. The old Bolshevik governor of Leningrad, Sergey Mironovich Kirov, had been assassinated in 1934, allowing Stalin to use his death as the pretext for a campaign of annihilating reprisals which on this occasion increasingly affected intellectuals. When his music was placed on the Index of Banned Composers in a Pravda article in January 1936, Shostakovich withdrew his score and it was not until 30 December 1961 that it received its first performance in Moscow under Kyrill Kondrashin. Gennady Rozhdestvensky gave its first foreign performance when he introduced it to Edinburgh audiences in 1962. In writing his Fourth Symphony, Shostakovich broke with symphonic convention. Here it is no longer themes but motifs and fragments of motifs and even accompanying figures that sustain the musical argument: the seemingly insignificant gives itself airs and is invested with greater weight. Here, too, Polonius supplants the prince. Romantically subjective outbursts of emotion are eschewed and instead everything is theatricalised - just as in life itself. The symphony opens marcatissimo with three Oriental skirls on everything but the bass instruments, followed by barbaric crescendos to quadruple and quintuple forte, but everything sounds mechanical, like a juggernaut coasting along, unstoppable, violent and eerie. Perhaps it is Hamlet's ghost - a ghost created by human hand - that haunts this work as well. The opera Der arme Kolumbus by Erwin Dressel (1909-1972) received its first performance in Kassel in 1928. In this particular version of the story. Columbus is no noble hero but an adventurer lured by the lustre of gold. Renamed Kolumbus, the work received its Soviet première at Leningrad's Maly Theatre on 14 March 1929, with additional music by Shostakovich, who provided an overture and finale. Shostakovich was currently working closely with the company, preparing for the first performance of his opera, The Nose. His two additional numbers provide, as it were, a summation of the musical mannerisms of his time, with farting and groaning trombone glissandi, figurations in the flutes highest register suggestive of spirited tightrope walkers, the vulgar, penetrating sound of the "singing saw" or flexatone, bombastic self-regarding solos, and crowing marchlike episodes followed by fleeting fugatos - all the characteristics, in short, of a figure like Polonius. For a long time Shostakovich's numbers for Kolumbus were believed to be missing but were rediscovered by Gennady Rozhdestvensky and given a concert performance at Tallinn in 1977. Sigrid Neef (Transl.: GB)