Dmitri Shostakovich

“By starting with the elegiac big tune of Zdravitsa, Prokofiev's toast to Stalin's 60th birthday. Bruno Monsaingeon's The Red Baton threatens to follow an all too familiar path, tormenting the ghosts of the Soviet Union's leading composers with their most compromising party-pieces. Yet... what we hear are the Russian geniuses' darkest, most dangerous scores. Monsaingeon's film is full... spotlights Rozhdestvensky as a spokesman of scathing Gogolia irony. Conducting, he says, is all charisma and a highly professional art; you arrive at rehearsals with the score in your head, assess the orchestra's capabilities and do the bare minimum, saving inspiration for the concert.” BBC Music Magazine, August 2008 *****

“Here, directed by Bruno Monsaingeon, are two 55-minute documentaries and two complete performances. In The Red Baton he has assembled Soviet archive footage and interviews with players to remind us of the realities of music-making in an era so remote as to be incomprehensible even to today's Russians. Strongly recommended.” Gramophone Magazine, November 2008

“Don't be deceived by the packaging or the DVD menu. Here, directed by Bruno Monsaingeon, are two 55-minute documentaries and two complete performances. In The Red Baton he has assembled Soviet archive footage and interviews with surviving players to remind us of the realities of music-making in an era so remote as to be incomprehensible even to today's Russians. For once there is no theory being proved or disproved.
Against a background of ceaseless bureaucratic interference, graduating at times to naked terror, paradoxically there developed a musical culture among the richest and most intense of the 20th century. That great survivor (and dissembler) Tikhon Khrennikov makes a cameo appearance but the bulk of recent testimony comes from Rudolf Barshai, who emigrated in the 1970s, and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, who stayed to champion an inner world of music in which everyone could feel free.
The second film shows Rozhdestvensky in action at various stages of his career, accompanying the big beasts of Soviet music, defending himself against the familiar charge of underrehearsal and passing on his accumulated experience to a variety of orchestras and student practitioners.
It says something that the love theme of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet still reduces him to tears. The complete performances, oddly billed as bonus tracks, are equally fascinating, not least the rarely heard Prokofiev cantata Zdravitsa, an ode to Stalin too explicit to find favour today. Taped in an empty hall, the sopranos sing a little flat. The melodic content is, more embarrassingly, top-notch.
The live rendition of the Schnittke, a film score souped up by Rozhdestvensky into a piece of performance art for himself, his orchestra and his wife, is surely the best record we have of a persona consciously designed to ensnare audiences and encourage musicians. The redoubtable Victoria Postnikova shines in a frantic parody of the octave cadenza from Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto.
Contemplating the events of 1948 can evoke tears, laughter too at the absurdity of it all.
Whether or not Rozhdestvensky's ironic detachment helped him survive, it has made him one of the last great individualistic maestros of our age.
His baton is still long, its movements unpredictable when not discarded altogether. And, unlike Stalin, he does not use a podium. Strongly recommended.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Bernstein was a first-rate Shostakovich interpreter and here's the clearest available insight into his concept of how the pathologically enigmatic Russian composer ticked. The complete performance, accumulates expressive weight as Bernstein holds the satire of the opening at a distance... before unlocking the magisterial depth of the symphony's middle section and finale.” Gramophone Magazine, August 2008

“Bernstein is thought-provoking in rehearsal and the memorable performance that follows features some superb solo playing” BBC Music Magazine

“This ties up nicely – Leonard Bernstein performing Shostakovich's First Symphony, written when he was 19, with an orchestra of young music students at the 1988 Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. Bernstein was a first-rate Shostakovich interpreter and here's the clearest available insight into his concept of how the pathologically enigmatic Russian composer ticked. The DVD opens with a 40-minute rehearsal in which Bernstein cogently describes Shostakovich's 'naughty boy' attitude – 'would you really want to start your first symphony like this?' he asks his amused orchestra, as he sings the jaunty, deadpan introductory bars.
Shostakovich's First was written only two years into Stalin's dictatorship, but Bernstein is right to locate an emerging, self-defensive satirical approach in these opening bars – if Ian Mac- Donald's The New Shostakovich is to be believed, he didn't think much of Lenin either. His description of how the work gradually fills the dimensions of a 'proper' symphony and arrives, symbolically, at a middle section filled with references to Wagner is persuasive.
This version was cut only a month after his 'official' reading with the Chicago SO. Hearing the two versions together demonstrates that this was Bernstein's settled view. And watching him gently coax his young charges – especially an obviously petrified clarinettist – is unexpectedly touching.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“this is no ordinary rehearsal. The orchestral players learn much more than they expected about what the composer is trying to convey, and so do we. The performance of the symphony itself has extraordinary power, a palette of colour and revelation of detail far beyond what we hear during an ordinary account. It is also thrillingly, marvellously played” Penguin Guide, 2011 edition