The Shostakovich catalogue is currently overburdened with releases marking the composer’s 100th birthday. Even so, there is room for this gorgeously-played, highly-charged rendition of the Fifth Symphony among all the boxed sets and re-releases. Oddly, some of the best sets contain Fifths that are comparative let-downs, so a high-quality, low-cost supplementary Fifth is very welcome. When Lorin Maazel, the NYP’s music director, is at his best, he invests his performances with a flair for musical story-telling that is hard to resist. The tense, helpless waiting of the outer sections of the first movement contrast with a militant build-up to the most vulgar presentation I know of the goose-stepping central episode. The scherzo achieves exceptional balance of its diverse elements; the naive Mahler-like Ländler is jammed into a nightmare of grotesquerie and sarcasm. In the Third movement the listener can sense the live audience becoming spellbound by the intensity of the quiet wind solos. And in the Finale Maazel manages a succession of tempos that avoids taking an explicit side in the argument as to the sincerity of the celebration of Socialist Optimism. And that is the essence of the movement–that one couldn’t reveal true feelings.
The First Cello Concerto receives nearly as good a performance. There is, however, an assortment of competitive top-ranking choices, from a muscular and confident Rostropovich premiere recording to the crisp, more kinetic excitement of Heinrich Schiff’s (both of which are newly re-released for the centennial) and the lyrical approach of Rafael Wallfisch’s newly-made Nimbus set. Harrell particularly scores in the second movement, where his phrasing is beautifully flexible and singing–perhaps an inheritance from his opera-singing father. And in the finale he discloses a level of panic beneath the energetic surface that I haven’t experienced in more than 40 years of loving and listening to the E-flat concerto. If his tone in places is not as strong or assertive as that of his competition, this is really a more accurate reflection of the actual balance found in live performances of cello and orchestra works.
The concept of “Concerts” downloads is most valuable as a means of documenting the achievements of great musicians in real concert settings. Here, at the beginning of its 2006-2007 season (the recordings are from around the last weekend in September, 2006), the New York Philharmonic’s playing is astonishingly good. The woodwinds are glorious, the string sections sound like mega-instruments played by a single hand, and the brass are crisp and flexible without forgetting Leonard Bernstein’s legendary instruction to play “like hunky brutes”. You could wish only that Avery Fisher Hall allowed the bass to sound more like a true foundation. At $10 for the download ($8.96 for the symphony alone and $4.96 for the concerto), it is a bargain. The musical content is long enough that each work requires its own separate disc when burned to CD format.
