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Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7
Product Type: Music
Product Price: $11.98
Manufacturer: Decca
Purchase
Reviews
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-02-05
Summary: "Listen to it over and over"
I still don't remember where I first heard this but I pull it out over and over. Would love to see it live someday.
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2008-07-11
Summary: "Leningrad"
Michael Jones' Leningrad: A State of Siege, which was just published and draws, in part, on recently "released" documents, refers to Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony a number of times. I quote from the INTRODUCTION:
It was not merely the Red Army that saved Leningrad from utter ruin. This book will tell the story of this city's survival, and what made that possible -- how the people of Leningrad found the resources within themselves to endure and to survive...The greatest symbol of this defiance was an extraordinary orchestral concert. On 9 August 1942 the besieged city put on a performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony....The symbolic importance of this concert was enormous...The Germans had boasted that they would capture the city on 9 August and hold a victory celebration at Leningrad's Astoria Hotel. The date for the Seventh Symphony's premiere was thus deliberately chosen...Many years after the war [the conductor] was approached by a group of German tourists, who said that they had come to the city especially to see him. They had been in the besieging army outside the city, so close that they were able to intercept Leningrad's radio signals, and hear the broadcast of Shostakovich's Seventh. Now these veterans said: "It had a slow but powerful effect on us. The realisation began to dawn that we would never take Leningrad."
Jones' book is VERY good. I can't wait to finish it. Then I am going to listen to the 7th again though in crucial respects I will be truly hearing it for the first time.
Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2005-10-04
Summary: "Haitink or Gergiev in the Leningrad Sym.?"
Some reviewers question whether the Shostakovich Sym. #7 is genuinely about the siege of Leningrad or a piece of pure music that fell into the lap of history. It gained its fame as a heroic war symphony and quickly lost popularity when the West stopped viewing the Soviet Union as an ally. I was excited by Leonard Bernstein's revival of the piece with the NY Phil. and then barely paid attention to it for thirty years.
But recently I went back to compare this twenty-year-old Haitink reading with the London Phil. (not the Concertgebouw--he alternated between the two orchestras for his Shostakovich cycle) and the recent Gergiev account with the Kirov Orch. on Philips. I expected Gergiev to excel on all counts, but there were surprising differences. First, the sound. Haitink is given wide-ranging, colorful sound that's fairly bright. Gergiev is given more distant, slightly cramped, duller sound. That's disappointing in the age of SACD.
As to timings, both conductors tend to pace deliberately. Haitink takes almost 29 min. in the first movement as compared to Gergiev's 27 min. What surprised me is that in the infamous jolly little march, which sounds best if taken satirically or at least with a snarl, Gergiev is carefree, setting aside any reference to invading Nazis on the march. Haitink is rather neutral; neither tries to make the music menacing or premonitory.
Haitink takes the quasi-Scherzo second movement a minute and a half faster than Gergiev, but that's enough to give his version a greater sense of urgency. At this point it would seem that Haitink will be better overall, but suddenly the woddwinds in the third movement cry out with real pain and panic under Gergiev, while Haitink is so neutral you muse about how the chords resemble Stravinsky. Just to confuse matters, Haitink's finale exhibits more fierceness in the allegro, where Gergiev seems to lose steam.
The Seventh is a problematic work, and I sympathize with any conductor who tires, as he must, to make it convincing all the way through. In this case, Haitink's version, which always seemed a bit neutral to me, is actually more exciting than Gergiev's. An unexpected result given how masterful Gergiev can be in Shostakovich's music.
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2003-07-09
Summary: "FORGET LENINGRAD"
This is the symphony made for CD. At nearly 80 minutes' worth the gaps between the movements are minimal, indeed there is none at all between the last two, but they managed it, and I detect no loss of sound quality such as used to accompany this sort of shoehorning in the LP days. The virtues of the performance are those of the others in this series that I have so far heard - big-scale, serious-minded interpretations, sensitivity to the mood-swings that are so characteristic of this composer, and impeccable orchestral work.
Probably no purely instrumental symphony by Shostakovich has given rise to so much extra-musical comment, but to my mind it can all be dispensed with. I am not troubled, or even visited, by thoughts of heroic workers, the sufferings of the people of Leningrad or the composer's uneasy relationship with the authorities when I hear it. And while it is certainly not unalloyed `absolute' music in the sense that Brahms's symphonies are that, the extent of the extra-musical expression imposed on it by its creator is not much more than one normally finds in Beethoven. The influence of Mahler on this work seems to me to be strong, not least on its expansiveness. The adagio alone is as long as many a Haydn symphony, and the first movement takes as long as Beethoven usually takes over all four, so music-lovers new to the work are counselled to listen in a more Mahler-oriented frame of receptivity. The resemblance to Mahler extends, in this symphony, even to the tone of voice that this chameleon among 20th century composers elects to adopt for the occasion, and it comes through most strongly and consistently, for me, in the slow movement.
If the first movement does not give you some problems I can only say it ought to. An enormous amount of the movement is taken up with a long series of repetitions of a single phrase with the orchestration building up over a long crescendo in a manner recalling Ravel's Bolero, a resemblance that cannot conceivably be accidental. I maintain, in the face of any orthodoxy to the contrary, that this sequence has absolutely no musical merit whatsoever. The theme itself is trivial and ridiculous, justly parodied by Bartok in the intermezzo interotto of the concerto for orchestra; and while Shostakovich is a thorough master of orchestral sound, I can't hear him as an absolute wizard in that department in the sense that Ravel is, or, come to that, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky, Strauss, Elgar or Walton.
Understandably enough, this symphony, written in 1941, was pressed into service with the patriotic spin-machine. The composer himself wrote a lengthy and dutiful commentary in furtherance of the its role as an ideological statement. However when the pressure came off he let out that he had planned it before the war. Depending on how you wish to take this intermediate version, it may in some sense be expressing anguish at the treatment of Leningrad by his own government. However there is a further twist, and there appears also to be some connexion with the Psalms. One approach to this music is to root deeply into these counter-indicative clues. The one I prefer is to ignore them altogether. Much (not all) of the first movement notwithstanding, this is music of major significance, intelligible and imposing without external references.
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2003-01-27
Summary: "Compelling and Magnificent !"
For me, the Seventh is the sovereign of the Shostakovich symphonies. I am mesmerized by its sometimes stark dignity and grandeur. Haitink marvelously reveals these qualities, as evidenced particularly in his journey through the adagio. Listen to the purity of expression he draws from the strings, and with it, at times, an aching, flowing, singing musical line. Also, in the opening movement, with its recurring march tune theme, he conveys an impression of rock steady command, and there's the poignant evocation towards the movement's close. A quiet sense of mystery carries into the final movement, where soon things become more visceral and immediate. Throughout, Haitink stays ably committed to the music's outspokenness, with its colorful and kaleidoscopic declarations and subtleties. As the final portions unfold he projects a compelling seriousness and ultimately, with cumulative power, an intense feeling of stateliness...The London Philharmonic plays gloriously. In both interpretation and sound, this is an A-1 disc.