DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
World premiere recording
Symphonie No. 4
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Live Recording
Sensational 80-Year Old Operatic Prologue Brought to Life
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICHPrologue to »Orango« World premiere recording Symphonie No. 4 Los Angeles Philharmonic Esa-Pekka Salonen Int. Release 02 Jun. 2012
2 CDs / Download
0289 479 0249 2
Live Recording
Exclusive World Premiere Recording:
Sensational 80-Year Old Operatic Prologue Brought to Life Tracklisting
CD 1: Shostakovich: Prologue To 'Orango'
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975)
Prologue to Orango
Orchestrated by Gerard McBurney
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen
Jordan Bisch, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon
Ryan McKinny, Daniel Chaney, Todd Strange, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen
Ryan McKinny, Daniel Chaney, Todd Strange, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon
Michael Fabiano, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen
Michael Fabiano, Eugene Brancoveanu, Yulia van Doren, Daniel Chaney, Todd Strange, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen
Eugene Brancoveanu, Yulia van Doren, Jordan Bisch, Ryan McKinny, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon
Abdiel Gonzalez, Ryan McKinny, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon
Gesamtspielzeit: 31:58
CD 2: Shostakovich: Symphony No.4
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975)
Symphony No.4 in C Minor, Op.43
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen
Gesamtspielzeit: 1:04:32
. . . [it proved] fitting that Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic were chosen to present "Orango" to the world. The precision, the theatricality and the deep feeling for the music displayed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall suggested a real understanding of [the score] . . . In Salonen's hands, these 40 minutes felt not like an afterthought or fragment, but like the opening salvo of something significant . . . a short, gripping curtain-raiser . . . The tenors Michael Fabiano and Timur Bekbosunov were outstanding among a strong ensemble cast, and Eugene Brancoveanu was amusing in the truncated title role . . . [a] thrilling performance . . .
. . . an exciting work, in his best jazzy style. Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic bring equal commitment to the Fourth Symphony.
. . . ["Orango"]: Esa-Pekka Salonen's LA forces give it five-star treatment -- the rising American tenor Michael Fabiano is outstanding . . . [a] stupendous account of the bewildering Fourth [Symphony] . . .
. . . ["Orango"]: Esa-Pekka Salonen and the LA Philharmonic have great fun with it, and there are fine performances from Eugene Brancoveanu as Orango, Ryan McKinny as the Entertainer who shows him off, and Michael Fabiano as the dubious Zoologist who lectures about him . . . [Symphony no. 4]: Salonen conducts it with cool lucidity and a sense of remorseless logic . . . Salonen's fondness for clear textures is very much in evidence, and often admirable.
. . . it's flavorful, enjoyable stuff, and Esa-Pekka Salonen leads a zesty performance . . . a full-throated and deeply convincing rendition of the composer's Fourth Symphony.
The symphony and the "Orango" prologue make a revealing pair in conjunction with deeply insightful notes from director Peter Sellars . . . The symphony is given a beautifully paced performance that achieves, more than most, a strong sense of through line despite a deeply fractured musical narrative . . . every episode fully makes its points in this performance . . . ["Orango"]: Esa-Pekka Salonen and his Los Angeles cast perform the piece with a confidence that suggests they could have written it.
. . . indeed, one of Shostakovich¿s wildest mélanges of folk tunes, marches, terrifying outbursts and an orchestration that includes car horns and whistles among other things . . . It is ¿ in all aspects ¿ the composer¿s audacious and largely successful depiction of a world gone mad . . . [Symphony No. 4]: Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen chose the bleak and terrifying Fourth as almost the logical extension of the mood established in "Orango" . . . I think this is Grammy award stuff! The Los Angeles Philharmonic emerged under Salonen as, arguably, the best orchestra in the country and I personally think that, during his tenure, they were an amazing and formidable ensemble. The recording is amazing . . . All the vocalists in Orango and every single instrumentalist in both pieces are splendid. This is an essential recording for admirers of Shostakovich as well as for fans of Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Strongly recommended!
. . . [This recording is further evidence of Shostakovich's] versatility and amazing capacity for hard work . . . ["Orango"]: Salonen and the cast catch every stylistic twist, and leave us wanting more . . . [Symphony no. 4 is] conducted and recorded here with unsparing clarity . . .
. . . [a] significant release . . . The level of the vocalism is high . . . the lovely-voiced Russian-American soprano Yulia van Doren and trenchant, versatile Kazakh new-music tenor Timur Bekbosunov prove comfortable with and convincing in the phonetics -- a key factor, surely, in rendering Shostakovich's stage works authentically . . . Ryan McKinny's narrating Entertainer handles the lion's share of the music with a strong bass-baritone . . . Michael Fabiano's fine, clear tenor sounds healthy in the Zoologist's little operetta-flavored arioso . . . The Los Angeles Philharmonic plays with precision and daring, giving the ballet movements full, apt flair . . . a grippingly fine performance of the complexly structured Fourth Symphony . . . Salonen's reading -- and the crackerjack L.A. Phil percussion section -- are right on target here.
. . . ["Orango"]: The musical gags are just about nourishing enough to succeed without visuals, and the final hysteria whips the audience into a frenzy . . . The "Prologue" makes a curious yet first-rate companion to the mighty Shostakovich Four. Salonen's approach to this half-human, half-monster Symphony is well-calculated. He makes clear connections between material that can so often seem random in the adventure of the first movement, and makes sure everything can be heard in cataclysmic climaxes. The clarity of bass lines and percussion is aided by the sound team's excellent management of LA's Walt Disney Concert Hall . . . the LA recording adds much to our understanding of an extraordinarily complex giant.
. . . [Salonen] turns his penetrating musical intellect on the extraordinary Fourth Symphony, achieving the kind of skewed logic that some merely hint at. It's a "composerly" account in which every thematic connection, however oblique, has something to say. Clarity is forensic, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic achieving levels of precision that can . . . totally suspend disbelief. And rarely has the enormous final chapter of the piece achieved a more harrowing inevitability.
. . . die Werke [weisen] eine kühne Stilvielfalt auf, was Salonen differenziert herausarbeitet . . . Salonen [verliert] nie den Gehalt aus dem Blick, was nicht zuletzt das weltentrückte Morendo der Celesta am Ende der Vierten zeigt . . .
Schostakowitsch kontrastierte revueartige Abschnitte mit tiefmelancholischen Szenen, Protestmusik mit Opernpomp. Sein bewährter Witz und Spott blitzt immer wieder auf in dem rund 30-minütigen Prolog . . . [die Uraufführung dirigiert von Esa-Pekka Salonen fand] unter großem öffentlichen Interesse mit dem Los Angeles Philharmonic statt. So konnte für diese Ersteinspielung die überzeugende Premierenbesetzung genutzt werden, vorneweg der Bass Ryan McKinny als wuchtig-kolossaler Entertainer. Der agile Tenor Michael Fabiano mimt den aalglatten Zoologen. Plastisch zeichnet Dirigent Salonen die schablonenartigen Szenen nach, subtil gelingen den Sängern und Orchester ironische Sollbrüche, flankiert von beeindruckender kraftvoller Klangopulenz. Insgesamt ergibt sich ein sehr geschmeidiges Bild dieses imponierenden Livemitschnitts . . . [4. Symphonie]: Auch hier führt Salonen ruhigen Mutes durch die aufrüttelnde Partitur und formuliert Unaussprechliches.
. . . [der Schostakowitsch-Könner Esa-Pekka Salonen hält] sein ehemaliges Orchester zu einer so bruitistisch knalligen wie elegant flexiblen, dabei wie gemeißelten Interpretation an . . . [eine] programmatisch sinnvoll wie auch scharf klangziselierte [4. Sinfonie] . . . [Esa-Pekka Salonen] hat jetzt "Orango" mustergültig vitalisiert und befeuert.
. . . ["Orango"]: Ein echter Fund und eine gelungene Ersteinspielung . . .
Eine explosive Mischung ist dieser Live-Mitschnitt . . . das erhaltene "Orango"-Material ist ein Knaller . . . Das Los Angeles-Philharmonic unter Esa-Pekka Salonen musiziert kraftvoll und mit spürbarer Lust an der Neuentdeckung . . . Hervorragend ist das Sängerensemble . . . allen voran der stimmgewaltige Ryan McKinny . . . [Symphony no. 4]: Dirigent und Orchester werden beiden Seiten der Komposition gerecht, ohne je in wehleidiges Pathos zu verfallen. Ein Konzertmitschnitt, der kaum einen Hörer kalt lassen dürfte!
. . . [Symphonie no. 4]: Salonen souligne avec un réel sens de la couleur cette coulée incandescente aux grands gestes oratoires, aux subites transformations de texture, d'orchestration et de rythme.
About the Album
InsightsDmitri Shostakovich:Orango · Fourth Symphony The 1930s in the USSR were a decade of seething upheaval. Stalinism, often wrongly thought of as solid and monolithic, was in fact in ceaseless motion. Simply to live their daily lives, Soviet citizens had constantly to navigate a sea of changing rules and contradictory ideological demands. For artists, this created special problems. A writer, composer or film-maker might respond one day with energy and imagination to the world as they saw it all around them, only to find the official interpretation of that world suddenly so altered that their work of art was now deemed unacceptable, offensive or even in dangerous opposition to the purposes of the newest revolutionary reality. The two works in this recording vividly reflect how such upheavals directly affected the life and music of Dmitri Shostakovich. The first, the opening to an ambitious and entertaining opera, was undertaken as a grandiose contribution to a nationwide official celebration in the early 1930s, but was then unceremoniously broken off, abandoned, and never returned to. The second, a mighty symphony, was conceived in the heroically abrasive and adventurous spirit of the mid-1930s but then suddenly overwhelmed by the regime’s deliberately repressive lurch early in 1936 towards nationalism, conservatism, traditionalism and romanticism. Although the score of the symphony was completed at that time, it was only able to be performed a quarter of a century later. In the 1920s and early 1930s, theatre was one of the most inventive and dynamic parts of Soviet culture and the young Shostakovich threw himself into dramatic adventures, producing, between 1927 and 1937, two operas, three ballets, ten film scores, one music-hall show and seven sets of incidental music, as well as other similar projects which remained unfinished but survive as sketches among the manuscripts left behind at his death in 1975. Among the most fascinating of these unfinished sketches is the prologue to Orango, composed in 1932 as the opening to a full-length satirical opera. Apart from its title, almost nothing was known about this work until 2004, when the Shostakovich scholar Olga Digonskaya unearthed a thirteen-page piano score of this prologue in the Glinka Museum in Moscow. From Digonskaya, we now know a good deal. The idea for this opera came from Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, which was looking for a striking contribution to the upcoming celebrations of the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution in the autumn of 1932. Their first task was to find a librettist ‒ or rather two: the well-known historical and science-fiction novelist Alexei Tolstoy (a distant relative of the author of War and Peace); and his regular collaborator, Alexander Starchakov. Tolstoy and Starchakov quickly came up with a startling idea for an uproariously irreverent squib, a satirical farce taking potshots at all kinds of aspects of contemporary culture: the much-discussed rebuilding of post-revolutionary Moscow, the latest fads in popular entertainment, the ludicrous exaggerations of mass-market journalism, the preposterous claims of modern science and much else besides. This helter-skelter medley was to be held together by an improbable story of an experiment in cross-beeding apes with humans to produce a “hybrid” – the Orango of the title – who achieves a dizzying career in Western Europe as a soldier in the First World War, then as a wheeler-dealer in Paris and finally as a powerful international press-baron promoting the rightwing interests of the capitalist world, before being betrayed and sold to a Soviet circus and taken to Moscow, to be exhibited for the amusement of the masses. The librettists began by drafting an outline of the whole opera: a three-act drama recounting Orango’s life, preceded by a scene-setting prologue taking place in contemporary Moscow. They then produced a detailed libretto of the prologue, which they handed over to Shostakovich: on the steps of the absurdly gargantuan (and never constructed) Palace of Soviets, a vast celebration of the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution is under way. Entertainments are provided but the restless crowd demands to see the famous Orango. When Orango is brought out, however, not all goes according to plan. The “ape” gets out of control. To calm the resulting uproar, the Master of Ceremonies (“vesel’čak” – “the entertainer”) brings on musicians and actors to tell Orango’s story (the next three acts would thus have taken the form of an extended flashback, or an opera within an opera). Shostakovich, who had just completed his preliminary draft of the third act of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, immediately set down a piano sketch for this prologue to Orango, borrowing the overture and other fragments from his earlier ballet The Bolt op. 27 (1931) and from his musical-hall show Declared Dead (Hypothetically Murdered) op. 31 (also 1931). He also amused himself weaving in a slew of witty and satirical references to other music, including Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and the Russian popular song “Chizhik-Pyzhik”. Alas, for reasons still unclear but almost certainly linked to wider changes in political and cultural policy in the autumn of 1932, Tolstoy and Starchakov never proceeded further with their libretto and the Bolshoi abandoned the project. In 2006 the composer’s widow, Irina Antonovna Shostakovich, invited the present writer to orchestrate what survives, keeping the composer’s original scoring for the fragments from The Bolt and elsewhere using models from his other theatrical pieces of the same period, including Lady Macbeth. If Shostakovich’s Orango has until now been almost completely unknown, his Fourth Symphony by contrast is one of his best-known and greatest symphonic utterances. At the same time, this music too comes with an extraordinary story reflecting the painful uncertainties of the time when it was written. In fact, for years this symphony’s true fate was obscured by rumor and misinformation and it was only in 1993, when Isaak Glikman published his correspondence from the composer, that a different tale emerged. It is known from anecdotes and press announcements that Shostakovich first began thinking about a major symphony on a Mahlerian scale in the early 1930s, and an unfinished fragment of an opening remains from that time. It was in the autumn of 1935, however, that he finally found his way, and by the end of that year he had drafted the first two movements, in a boldly original style that takes to new heights the distinctive combination of the epic and the modernistic which was so characteristic not only of Soviet music but of Soviet films and novels of the mid 1930s. Then in January 1936 began the notorious campaign of public attacks on Shostakovich, opening with the Pravda article “Muddle instead of music”. These attacks were themselves opening shots in a far wider official campaign to change the whole atmosphere and tenor of Stalinist culture and society. This was the beginning of the period now infamously remembered as the Great Terror, and the final movement of this symphony was thus completed in an atmosphere of the greatest danger. Perhaps that is one reason why this movement’s intensely enigmatic music, weirdly combining dark tragedy with dreamlike sequences of music-hall and silent-film music, should be so shot through with echoes of the composer’s earlier works, including a strange quotation from the 1931 music-hall show Declared Dead (in the original show, the passage quoted accompanies a “Dance of the Cherubim” from an atheist cabaret in Heaven) and, as Olga Digonskaya has recently shown, a fragment from an abandoned opera on the 19th-century revolutionary movement, Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will). There are also quotations from music by other composers, including Papageno’s panpipe motif from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Despite the horrifying circumstances surrounding its composition, Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony was successfully completed and scheduled for performance by the Leningrad Philharmonic under the distinguished Austrian conductor Fritz Stiedry. What happened next, however, was fiercely debated until Glikman published his story. According to his account, he was present with the composer at a rehearsal when an official from the Smolny (the headquarters of the Communist Party in Leningrad) appeared, work was stopped, and Shostakovich was forced to withdraw his symphony. Glikman was also present 25 years later in December 1961, when the Fourth was finally given its long-delayed first performance, in Moscow under Kyril Kondrashin. On that occasion, Glikman claimed, the composer turned to him and said: “I think in many ways the Fourth is better than my later symphonies.” Gerard McBurney 5/2012 “An astute master of indirection”
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