It taketh all types, Mikeh.
Just to cheer you up Dieter - I abhor Bruckner!
Okay, I have Mravinsky - surely along with Rattle, Karajan, and Solti, one of the most overrated wand waverers on Terra Firma - blathering 3rd rate Shostakovich 12 on the background - my wife and daughter are screaming Turn that shit down - and I am as bored by this so-called Symphony as I am by the 'venerated/overrated' 'Leningrad Symphony. I just do NOT get it. Then again, Proust, Tsiolkas, Murnane, Adams, Glass, Melville, most Mendelsohn, Milhaud, and Gerontius leave me in that constipated state of confusion re the notion that anyone can take these works seriously. Then again, I am on the brink of my 74th year on this planet and I learned today that one's brain cells reach a different phase of their developing decline. However, to compensate, apparently the ability of writers, artists and musicians becomes more universally developed. It is certain that Shostakovich after he left his Propaganda focused exile and wrote some of his greatest masterpieces - symphonies 13-15, the late quartets, the very late vocal/orchestral music and I bet my bottom shekel he hated symphonies 12, 11 and 7 more than anything he wrote or was forced to write.
By the way, you real Shostakovich lovers, check out the YOUTUBE Berlin Phil 8th and 15th on YOU TUB, check out the 2nd Cello Concerto with his son Michael, and above all, check out the YOUTUBE 15th conducted by Michael Sanderling in Dresden
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What is this antipathy to the 12th?
Its weakness is predominantly the last movement - much of the rest of it is perfectly fine. Shostakovich was not always at his best in programmatic music it's true (although who on earth can say the coda to the finale of the 11th isn't inspired?), but the 12th is more consistent than some because it's a concisely composed work. It does, however, need a very convincing performance, and you can get very lost in the first movement before you even get to the Development if you don't know what you're doing - and here's the rub. It rarely gets a good performance. Often you need to look outside complete cycles to get a better performance.
There are seventeen complete cycles by different conductors and in none is there a truly great Shostakovich 12.
Rozhdestvensky/Philharmonia from Edinburgh (the same week they premiered in the West the 4th) is the most electrifying on disc. It's a hell-raising experience, phenomenally exciting - no one comes close to it in my view. Adrian Boult gave the London premiere with the BBCSO soon afterwards - a very different kettle of fish, but it's remarkable nevertheless - not just to have Boult in this symphony but to find him so connected to the work, too. There are other great performances: Mravinsky (at least twice; he possibly gave one in Prague) and Masashi Ueda (Japanese premiere, 1962), Konstantin Ivanov (1961) - even Durjan in Dresden. These all make very, very persuasive arguments for the work as a substantial, serious symphony. And they treat it as such. Some of the greatest percussion (overwhelming) and brass playing in this symphony - although it's a slow performance - is on the disc by Vakhtang Jordania and the Deutsche SO.
Performances have been getting slower over the decades - Storgards isn't an anomaly there. Rouvali recently conducted the symphony with the Concertgebouw and it sounded more like Bruckner. Michyoshi Inoue did it with the NHKSO in Tokyo and it was thrilling - but this is a conductor who was the first to give a complete Shostakovich cycle in Japan, the first to record one and has been conducting him for over 30-years. His current, on-going cycle with the Osaka/New Japan Phil. outplays the Nelsons from Boston in every possible way.
Of all the Shostakovich CD cycles the one incomplete one, by a single symphony, is by Gergiev - he did not do a 12th with either the LSO or Mravinsky. He never played it in London. However, it does appear on his Blu-ray cycle. He at least conducted the symphony once - badly as it happens.
I hope Rouvali will do the symphony in London with the Philharmonia - his 'Leningrad' was of the Bernstein kind. I won't complain if he takes 45-minutes over it - I just want him to give it some serious thought, some respect. A performance like that might just persuade some people the symphony is not a second-rate work. How many dull and limp 5ths, 10ths and 8ths must I sit through just to hear one 12th?
I read Nick Barnard's review of the 'BBC Philharmonic/John Storgårds' Shostakovich 12 and 15th with interest. I rate 12 as lowly as I rate 11, 7, 2 and 3 but 15 is just about my favorite Shostakovich Symphony - 'Alte kaker' music at its best - 4, 8, 13, 10. 6, 5, not far behind. Nick recalls Maxim's first recording because of its lively pace, a pace Mravinsky also favored. Me, I'm a Kurt Sanderling fan, and all three of his recordings are in no hurry to get nowhere fast. Michael Sanderling's live performance with a Dresden Orchestra performed on the anniversary of one of the Allied Crimes - namely the firebombing of a city full of homeless refugees - follows in his great father's footsteps. It is available on YouTube and the unbroken silence at the Symphony's end, broken only when the orchestra and the audience one by one stands, is poignantly devastating.
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