Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 4 & 10

Album review

In January 1936, Shostakovitch put the final touches to his Fourth Symphony, when the doleful bell sounded which would become famous as Pravda's "Chaos in the Place of Music" article, dictated by the dastardly Stalin, who hadn't enjoyed the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Not fancying a thirty-year holiday in Siberia (or a trip to the mortuary), the composer finished his symphony, in fear of hearing the midnight knock at the door from the terrible NKVD, the forerunners of the KGB. He started rehearsals, but in the end he withdrew the work from the billing on some lame pretext, stuck it in a drawer, and forgot about it... For a quarter of a century, until 1961, when it was finally performed. It is one of the bitterest, darkest, most sinister works by Shostakovitch, who was not short of such pieces, and it is not hard to imagine that for Stalin it might have been the straw that broke the camel's back. Stalin would, quite involuntarily, assist in the creation of the Tenth Symphony, as it was written in the wake of the beast's death, in 1953. To be sure, this work was hardly lighter than the Fourth and the central Scherzo is one of those raging, brutal moments for which Shostakovitch is so well-known; but the third movement, terrifically lyrical, blows away the clouds of the second, with the famous DSCH signature theme, which seems to open a new era. The Russian National Orchestra, founded in 1990 by pianist and conductor Mikhail Pletnev – winner of the first prize in the 1978 Tchaikovsky Competition, and who conducts this recording – is very much at work in their element here. © SM/Qobuz