Dmitri Shostakovich

This version of the 5th Symphony was authorized by the composer. It represents a reduction of a real orchestral sound – a romantic expression of will, one which exploits the possibilities of the instrument to the full, and beyond maybe, too.

David Oistrakh’s 1967 performance of Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with Eugene Ormandy conducting the LSO was the Western European Premiere of the work. This is a major historical document.

Since this was a Gala concert in aid of the LSO Trust, the Shostakovich performance was preceded by a Fanfare composed by Arthur Bliss and this has been included.

The Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto from 1972, a work very much associated David Oistrakh, was performed during a Russian Festival in London’s Royal Albert Hall is conducted by Maxim Shostakovich, the composer’s son. This makes a great combination.

Both recordings are in very good stereo and David Oistrakh’s playing is sensational.

David Oistrakh has a large and varied BBC Legends catalogue including a later version of the Shostakovich Violkin Concerto No.2 with Svetlanov (BBCL40602).

With Vol.V the Mandelring Quartet completes the fifteen string quartets of Shostakovich. Highly praised in the press as one of the outstanding complete editions of our time, the last volume presents the Quartets Nos. 11, 13 and 15.

The Eleventh Quartet received its premiere in the former Leningrad at the preliminary celebrations of the composer's 60th birthday. During the very same night, the composer suffered a serious heart attack which changed his life and way of thinking. This 1966 quartet was dedicated to the late violinist of the Beethoven Quartet, an ensemble with which the composer was intimately acquainted, appears as a multi-movement suite in which character pieces such as the "Etude" and the "Humoresque" turn up - with a grim, cynical humour, of course.The 13th Quartet composed in 1970 is dedicated to the violist of the Beethoven Quartet and is a portrait, in a single monumental movement, of this instrument that Shostakovich loved so much. In the final, 15th Quartet (1974), the composer finally seizes upon a radical formal solution: six Adagio movements come together to form a large work of mourning which bears no more dedication… With Shostakovich's fifteen string quartets the Mandelring Quartet presents a quartet cycle, which in its entirety probably represents the most important corpus of string quartets of the 20th century.

"This is uncanny playing and it has been recorded with uncanny clarity and presence by Audite's engineers… the Shostakovich cycle of choice." International Record Review

Following their electrifying account of Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony (8572082), Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra explore the profound ambivalences of the composer’s most performed symphony, the Fifth, written in 1937 at a time when he was under intense personal and political pressure from the authorities.

The jaunty, neo-classical character of the Ninth Symphony (1945) prompted Shostakovich to remark that ‘musicians will like to play it, and critics will delight in blasting it’.

Shostakovich’s startlingly different original draft for the opening of the Ninth’s first movement is available on 8572138.

It was primarily in chamber music that Shostakovich found the space to develop his individual, distinctive musical language. Shostakovich was only 17 when he composed the first piano trio and it was one of his first works to be performed in public in Moscow. Juon was born in 1872 in Moscow, he studied violin and composition at the local conservatoire. Juon’s first piano trio was published in 1901, a period of his work which was heavily influenced by 19th century Russian music.

The recordings contained in this set of Shostakovich's Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies were all made soon after the first performances of each work, and have an authenticity as well as a musical immediacy that later recordings inevitably have lacked, good as they may be. These recordings stand as unique sound documents in the history of the interpretation of Shostakovich's music. In addition they testify to Stokowski's own personal style as an interpreter of this composer's works. Shostakovich held Stokowski in high esteem as an exponent of his music. These performances were previously issued on other labels (no longer available); the present restorations are state of the art, from the best possible sources.