Orango was planned as a satirical opera to be presented at a celebration of the 15th Anniversay of the October Revolution in 1932. Shostakovich got as far as the Prelude (and then only in piano score) before the project was cancelled due to a sudden change in the political winds during the Stalinist era. The score was discovered in the Glinka Museum in 2004, and later orchestrated by Gerald McBurney for the premiere performance by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2011.
Orango is an intelligent ape-human hybrid who achieves worldwide fame through his various careers before being betrayed and sold to a Soviet circus. The Prologue takes place at a fictionalized celebration of the 15th Anniversary of the October Revolution, where the exploited Orango “goes ape” and attempts to rape a female audience member. The Prologue ends with the Master of Ceremonies attempting to appease the agitated crowd with various musical and balletic entertainments, before recounting the story of Orango’s life.
For some numbers, including the Overture and Nastya’s dances, Shostakovich recycled music from his ballet The Bolt, which made it easy for McBurney to orchestrate the remainder of the material. The bulk of the music follows The Bolt’s sarcastic style (a style shared by the coupled Symphony No. 4), while the choral numbers’ faux-seriousness is reminiscent of the composer’s Symphony No. 2. The soloists perform their roles with artistry and conviction, while the chorus sounds appropriately stoic. As for the satirically ideological text, some of the humor works today (the farcical Zoologist), while a good bit of it remains stuck in its era. Overall, Orango is more an intriguing curiosity than the profoundly relevant discovery that the booklet note writers make of it—but it’s enjoyable nonetheless. And, as the singers, chorus, conductor, and orchestra present an engaging and convincing performance, its recording is both welcome and appreciated.
Salonen’s quickly-paced Shostakovich Fourth brings to mind Ormandy’s, which is similarly sassy and satiric (in contrast to the usually sardonic readings we hear today). Woodwinds feature prominently, especially in the Finale, which receives the most probing reading here. The CD booklet reveals that Shostakovich used this movement as a repository for a number of his involuntarily abandoned musical projects. Salonen sounds acutely aware of this as he plays the movement’s balletic episodes with unusual gravity.
The Los Angeles strings also impress as they impeccably negotiate the furious first-movement fugue. But here the Philharmonic’s virtuosity works against it—the players toss off the passage so easily that there’s little of the edge-of-seat tension that it should generate (compare to Järvi and hear the frenzy that’s missing with Salonen). This characteristic also occurs, most disturbingly, in the brass, which sounds far too blended in the orchestral texture. The trumpets, lacerating in recordings by Järvi, Previn, and Slatkin, sound relatively tame under Salonen.
I suspect that the engineering has a lot to do with this impression. Made live, the recording sounds as though produced for broadcast, with a foreshortened sense of space and dynamic compression that robs the climaxes of their impact—something you positively do not want in this symphony! This is too bad, because I suspect had the recording not been so constricting, this performance might have been counted as one of the great ones. Since it cannot be, stick with the recommended versions.
