Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103 'The year 1905'

“The late Yakov Kreizberg conducts a richly noble performance: though lacking sufficient chill in the opening, it delivers ferocity for the Bloody SUnday massacre and a hair-raisingly baleful end.” BBC Music Magazine, August 2012 ****

“This is an interpretation of the time in which the symphony appeared and, moreover, it’s by one of Shostakovich’s greatest interpreters. Mravinsky offers an interpretation of raw power which confronts the listener...This is one of those recordings that’s an essential element in any Shostakovich collection.” MusicWeb International, August 2012

“Supported by a vivid SACD recording, Gergiev delivers a compelling account of the Second. His vast experience as an opera conductor pays real dividends in maximising the theatricality of the musical experience...exhorting the full-throated voices of the Mariinsky Theatre Choir to sing the unashamedly propagandist text with conviction and fervour.” BBC Music Magazine, February 2011 *****

“Gergiev, ever the astute interpreter, carves intelligent readings that show just how varied the composer was in his dark, impulsive heart...Not only has [Gergiev] and his attentive orchestra faithfully and artfully scaled one of the composer’s highest peaks with the 11th, they’ve gone some way to invigorating a less popular work with the second.” Daniel Ross, bbc.co.uk, 15th December 2010

“Gergiev balances the lines meticulously and the accumulative effect is impressive” Classic FM Magazine, February 2011 ***

“Gergiev generates a frisson in everything he conducts, but it is only in French and Russian repertoire that his stylistic antennae seem secure...[He] captures [the Eleventh's] brooding majesty in a tense and involving performance, distinguished by the terrifying sound of the St Petersburg winds.” Financial Times, 7th January 2011 ****

“Favouring quick-fire tempi, occasionally too fast for clear articulation, Gergiev avoids getting bogged down in dutiful note-spinning...While the score has more terror and more warmth than Gergiev reveals, admirers will find plenty of compensating flair and drive.” Gramophone Magazine, March 2011

“As always, there are moments of greatness, especially in the first movement [of No. 11], where an exceptional control of balance and long range dynamics, combine with a sure dramatic sense, creates a sense of brooding expectation..however, there's a growing lack of focus” International Record Review, March 2011

“Impeccably vivid playing from the Mariinsky orchestra ensures Gergiev is wonderful at depicting both that cinematic pictorialism and the strangeness of the Second Symphony's world; when the chorus intervenes in the Second, triggered by the sound of a factory siren, that is pretty hair-raising, too.” The Guardian, 18th November 2010 ****

“[Wigglesworth] gets playing of great refinement from the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, setting the scene in the opening movement The Palace Square perfectly, but can also conjure up raw brutality in the final movement with tingling vividness when required... the 11th has rarely seemed so cogent.” The Guardian, 18th March 2010 ****

“…Petrenko… keeps an extremely tight grip on proceedings, opting for flowing speeds in the first and third movements while carefully building up an exciting symphonic tension through the intense climactic passages that dominate the second and fourth. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic delivers an incisive and strongly committed performance with splendid and expressive solos from the flute, cor anglais and trumpet...” BBC Music Magazine, May 2009 ****

“Vasily Petrenko has galvanised Liverpool musicmaking to such an extent that his contract has already been extended until 2012, with a fair chance that the Rattle/Birmingham phenomenon will be replicated on Merseyside. That said, who made the decision to start the new series with No 11? This is a piece which, viewed variously as a conformist artefact of socialist realism, a coded indictment of Soviet tyranny, 'a film score without the film' and/or something more complex, tends to divide the composer's admirers.
Mstislav Rostropovich was one of its most individualistic interpreters, extending its playing time to more than 72 minutes in his epic 2002 account (see above). Petrenko has no truck with that kind of self-indulgence, if self-indulgence it be, looking instead to the furious 54-minute precedent of Kyrill Kondrashin in 1973. There's never any feeling of ploughing dutifully through the notes at this kind of lick, although the Naxos recording is not quite ideal. Timps and bells could be more sympathetically miked and more carefully pitched, while brass and upper strings lack the extraordinary weight of Rostropovich's LSO. Still, there's no mistaking the rapid transformation of the RLPO's corporate profile, no want of character, attack or rhythmic definition.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“…there's no mistaking the rapid transformation of the RLPO's corporate profile, no want of character, attack of rhythmic definition.” Gramophone Magazine, May 2009

“[Petrenko] achieves world-class results with a rejuvenated RLPO in this gripping account…. This outstanding account of a great symphony can hold its head high among recent versions… At Naxos prices, it’s an unbeatable bargain.” Sunday Times

“. It's too easy to make the whole work sound like an overheated ?lm score, but Petrenko succeeds marvellously in stressing its symphonic credentials. There's rigour and restraint in his performance, which never takes the easy, ?ashy route when something more musically telling can be chosen instead. The Liverpool orchestra matches that restraint with re?nement. It's an auspicious beginning.” The Guardian, 27th March 2009 ****

“Vasily Petrenko and the RLPO here notch up another commanding success with a dynamic recording of Shostakovich's Symphony No 11. Petrenko has a clear sense of the music's ominous, emphatic drama here, but equally the presentiment that emerges from the still emptiness of the opening tableau is palpable, the threnody of the third movement conceived with a genuine sense of the grief and funereal bleakness that the music's dying phrases so powerfully describe. The RLPO is on top form here, sensitive to the symphony's darker colours as well as to the warning blasts and aggression of the finale. This is a gripping, visceral performance” The Telegraph, 4th March 2009

“there's no doubting [Petrenko's] iron control, or the orchestra's multicoloured splendour, from the malevolent glare of sneering brass to the numbed quietude of the strings. This is a recording you have to hear.” The Times, 13th March 2009 ****

“Bychkov’s harrowing account … vividly evokes the ‘frozen paralysis’ – the conductor’s words – of the Palace Square movement, the horror of the massacre, the deeply moving In Memoriam for the victims and the hollow despair of the Tocsin.” The Sunday Times

“The performance from the WDR Symphony Orchestra is compelling at both ends of the dynamic spectrum, from the heart-rending funereal tread of the opening paragraph of 'In Memoriam' to the savage fugue of the '9th January'.” BBC Music Magazine, July 2006 *****

“Half a century on from its composition and a full century from the events it ostensibly commemorates, the Eleventh Symphony remains a problematic work for conductors, not least because very few of them or their players have direct memories to draw on. Whatever view they take, nothing is going to come across unless the balance between atmosphere and flow is convincingly struck, and in this respect Bychkov has sure instincts.
Now that he has been principal conductor in Cologne for nearly 10 years, it seems that matters of texture, colour and line in Shostakovich have become second nature for his players: Bychkov gives onward momentum its due, and urgency and inevitability are his reward.
Quibbles could be entered. In the second movement, from 12'45" (the scene of the attack of the Tsarist police), the trombone glissandi may disappoint those who have heard them given full power. At the heart of the following 'In memoriam' more poignancy would not have gone amiss. But then the climax of that movement is magnificently denunciatory, and the WDR cor anglais laments with eloquence and depth but not a trace of sentimentality.
The attacca into the finale is ideal in its sudden spit of venom.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010