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Shostakovich - Petrenko
Posted by Mike Hardy on May 18, 2012, 8:57 am
Well said Dan Morgan! I have been thinking for some time that I was alone in finding the Petrenko /RLPO Shostakovich symphonies dull and shallow and grossly over-rated. Fairly well played - yes! Competent - yes! Well recorded - yes! Good interpretations - NO!
In addition to Haitink (I agree totally with Dan's comments) can I suggest that (comparing "provincial" orchestras) Berglund's 7 & 11 (Bournemouth Symphony, Karabits' 11 (BBC "free 2 disc - BSO again - do make an effort to find this one)all leave Petrenko standing. And I haven't mentioned Kondrashin......
Re: Shostakovich - Petrenko
Posted by Martin Walker on May 18, 2012, 3:44 pm, in reply to "Shostakovich - Petrenko" 82.249.3.157
I have to agree with Dan Morgan, too, though I have not heard this CD, for good reason: I bought the 10th some months ago after surveying a succession of adulatory reviews, above all in the British press - and found the performance well-recorded in a rather glaring, metallic way; you could hear more of the notes than on my other three recordings, but that was about it. The music, heavily and unimaginatively phrased, left me cold - and I began to feel the enormous Shostakovitch hype of recent years was just that - hype - and nothing more. To refresh my memory today I first put on the short but decisive 2nd movement "Stalin" allegro as performed by Mitropoulos with the NYPO (1954) - an unrelenting portrait of viciously destructive hysteria, one might say; poor sound - but unbearably exciting. Then I played the Petrenko, still as digitally hard though note-revealing as sound but interpretatively flat and undistinguished, followed by the Ancerl (1956), not much more impressive as a recording than Mitropoulos - but what a performance, like some monstrous (party?) machine crunching everything in its path. Finally I put on Mravinsky (1976), also not brilliant in terms of (No-Noised) recording quality, but an interpretation which draws you in to finally pound you inexorably to extinction. This takes nearly as long as Petrenko (the other two being rather faster), but the effect is quite different, being musically shaped as a whole. I shan't be investing in any more of the Petrenko Naxos set, I must say.
Here is what I wrote for Amazon's "customer reviews": I find it remarkable the gushing hype that seems to accompany all things Petrenko. For sure this is a fine disc [Shostakovich 10] and very well played indeed by the RLPO. At bargain price it is a strong contender but what has me scratching my head is how quickly other reviewers seem to have forgotten the classic - and I do mean classic- performances of the past. Forget Karajan - never quite sure he had a hotline to the soul of Soviet Russia. Mravinsky/Svetlanov/Rohzdestvensky/Kondrashin were there and any of their recordings have an authenticity of spirit that no-one can match today as well as the hair-raising sound of a soviet orchestra baying for blood. OK is you have an aversion to that sound world (but surely it is as authentic a part of this composer as any HIP of Mozart or Bach)try others but even then I would say try Berglund (the Bournemouth SO in trenchantly exciting form) or Jarvi with the SNO on Chandos. I do understand that every new generation of collectors wants to discover repertoire for itself anew in new performances but I do regret that that means the great versions of the past are left behind.
For expressing a negative review the majority of people consider this "unhelpful" so we are truly in a world where everything always has to be smily-face wonderful. Shostakovich would have approved...............
Let us be clear; Petrenko is a technically very gifted conductor with a commendably clear and individual musical view. From my perspective I don't think its a very interesting view once one has stopped applauding the bravura playing from the orchestra. I felt exactly the same when blind reviewing his "Isle of the Dead" for this site and I attended the Manfred Prom and felt exactly the same - great playing, generalised interpretation.
I've read the contributions to date with some interest because I've reviewed five out of the seven instalments of Vasily Petrenko's Shostakovich cycle and my verdicts have been pretty positive though I hope Nick Barnard has not placed them under the heading of "gushing hype".
It's noticeable that contributors have cited several great Shostakovich performances of the past - Ancerl in the 10th, for example. That's a yardstick performance for me. (I've never been able to hear the Mitropoulos 1954 recording, much to my frustration.) I share the high regard in which such recordings are held - at the start of my review of Petrenko's CD of the Eighth, for example, I cited Mravinsky's BBC Legends version as being in a class of its own - and I'd add to the pantheon, among other leading recordings, Bernstein's Chicago reading of the Seventh and almost any of Kondrashin's Melodiya recordings, through which I first got to know many of the synphonies on LP. Barshai's WDR cycle shouldn't be overlooked either.
However, perhaps it's unsurprising that Petrenko's readings don't measure up in the eyes of some seasoned collectors. Conductors such as Mravinsky, Ancerl, Kondrashin and Barshai were active on the podium when Shostakovich was writing those symphonies. More to the point, they were men of those times and the social and political world behind the old "iron curtain" that spawned those symphonies was a world they knew at first hand. Petrenko and other conductors of his generation don't have that direct experience. Bernard Haitink, another admirable exponent of Shostakovich, is in a different category: I believe his credentials in that music stem to a significant extent from his empathy with and understanding of Mahler.
So if it's felt that Petrenko doesn't dig as deeply as did some of his predecessors this may be because, perforce, he comes to the music from a different perspective. He may not penetrate as deeply as Mravinsky or Kondrashin do - because it's second nature to them - but I still believe his recordings are worthwhile additions to the catalogue - especially for collectors who may be trying out some of these symphonies for the first time.
Re: Shostakovich - Petrenko
Posted by Dan Morgan on May 20, 2012, 3:07 pm, in reply to "Re: Shostakovich - Petrenko" Message modified by board administrator May 20, 2012, 5:13 pm
I respect John Quinn's views, and his points are well made. What I would say is that reviews are, by nature, comparative, and in a market crammed with fine product it 's incumbent on us to mention rival recordings, whatever their provenance.
And where Shostakovich is concerned the competition is formidable, not just from acknowledged 'authorities' such as Kondrashin and Mravinsky, but from the two Marks - Elder and Wigglesworth - and the up-and-coming Daniel Raiskin and Andris Nelsons. Every one of them has has given us distinctive, probing accounts of Shostakovich's symphonies that, to my ears at least, far outstrip anything Vasily Petrenko has done in this field.
As for anyone coming to these works for the first time, surely it's important they hear them at their best? Even budget-conscious newbies need not confine themselves to labels such a Naxos - whose CDs aren't as cheap as they once were - given the number of budget and super-budget reissues on the market. After all, buying music is essentially a consumer activity; it's about choice and about perceived value, so why settle for less - musically at least - when you don't have to?
For reasons I've already hinted at Petrenko's cycle wouldn't be my recommended introduction to this infuriating, contradictory, complex and enigmatic composer precisely because he brings out none of these dichotomies. Perhaps in time he'll dig deeper, but for the moment his Shostakovich leaves me short-changed.
