Songs
Song of Cordelia and 10 Fool's Songs from incidental music to the play, King Lear, opus 58a, Six Romances to verses by British Poets, opus 62/140, Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, opus 146§, two of Five Romances from texts from Krokodil magazine, opus 121§, Rayok§.
Anatoly Levin (cond), Orchestra of the Moscow Chamber Theater, Alexei Mochalov (bass).
Complete texts in phonetic Russian, English, French and German.
Russian Disc Triton 17 008. DDD. TT 62:49.
§ World première recordings of chamber arrangements of unidentified authorship.

Hommage à Shostakovich
Rayok[a], Concertino, opus 94[b], From Jewish Folk Poetry, opus 79[c].
Vladimir Spivakov (cond), The Moscow Virtuosi, Alexei Mochalov (bass), The Moscow Choir Theatera, Julia Zilberquit (piano)[b], Nikolai Kurpe (tenor), Marina Zhukova (soprano), Elena Svechnikova, (contralto)[c].
Texts for opus 79 only, in phonetic Russian and English; no libretto for Rayok.
Music Master Classics 01612-67189-2. DDD. TT: 60:35.
[a] World première recording of chamber arrangement by Vladimir Spivakov and Vladimir Milman.
[b] World première recording of arrangement for solo piano and chamber orchestra by Julia Zilberquit.

Here are two discs with distinguished programs and performances, each with notable world premiere recordings. Unfortunately, neither of them may reach the circulation they deserve thanks, in part, to their poorly labeled jackets. More will be said about this at the end of this review.

A number of all-Shostakovich song discs have appeared in the past, but none to my knowledge has dedicated an entire programme, as the current Triton disc has, to the common theme of satire. Nowhere else has such a nearly complete thematic summary of the composer's mordant utterances in this genre been grouped together in a single album. The only explicitly satirical cycle missing from the program is the 1965 Satires, as well as the brief setting, Preface, of 1966.

The theme of satire returns with enough frequency and persistence to establish itself as an important subgenre of Shostakovich's vocal music. This collective body of work appears in a rather scattered fashion throughout the composer's catalogue and is not at all uniformly successful. Still, it underlines a unique aspect of the composer's creativity and prompts us to take inventory of yet another alter ego of this richly complex artist.

I will first comment on each of the pieces contained on that disc, and follow it with the review of both discs.

The earliest and only work originally scored for chamber ensemble on the Triton programme is the King Lear stage music of 1940, which includes Cordelia's Song and the 10 Songs of the Fool. The Fool's Songs are brief, uncomplicated sketches which are full of good-natured wit. They nicely come together as a self-contained cycle, even though the composer's original intention evidently was to intersperse them at points indicated by Shakespeare's play. Musically the songs are knit together by their pervasive jollity and thematic interlinkings - including the self-effacing references to the tune Jingle Bells in the first four. They also follow a continuous dramatic arc, slightly increasing in seriousness as their verse follows the events of the play. In the culminating tenth and longest of the set, the prior gaiety gives way to a sweetly mournful conclusion, a muse on the sacrificial loyalty and dedication of the fool.

These settings establish a noteworthy precedent in Shostakovich's songwriting activity. The composer's identification with the figure of the fool is almost inseparable from his expression of humour in this medium. The adoption of the fool's persona may be partly an identification with the classic Russian figure of the yurodivy. However, it appears too late in his career to be interpreted as an act of political camouflage. The role appears again in the Krokodil and Lebyadkin cycles, and is most explicitly personalized in the autobiographical Preface, all written during the composer's final decade. As a gradually emerging counterpart to Shostakovich the tragedian, only in later cycles does the composer adopt the message-bearing role of everyman's jester, pointing his satirical weapons at the universal themes of moral and social injustice.

Cordelia's Song is a worthy inspiration, a restrained, dignified march tune that one would expect to find in the repertoire of the Red Army chorus. Through repetition, the song gradually increases in volume, yet is prevented from reaching the full climactic pitch of which it is clearly capable.

Still, these songs look back rather than ahead. Stylistically and psychologically they are allied to the unfettered giddiness of the then nearly decade-old Hamlet score, unencumbered by the dark irony which one day would seize hold of all Shostakovich's humorous utterances.

The Six Romances to Verses by British Poets were written in the wake of the Leningrad Symphony while the composer was in evacuation at Kuibyshev in 1942. The lofty subject matter and subdued musical content of these songs seem to have provided the composer with an emotional escape, a consoling antidote to the traumatic events of the times. The texts take up various humanitarian issues such as friendship, loyalty, the decline of values, and mockery of authority. As if to further celebrate the bonds of human contact, each song bears a dedication to someone close to the composer: Lev Atovmyan, Shostakovich's first wife Nina, Isaac Glikman, Sviridov, Sollertinsky, and Shebalin. Perhaps partly as a tribute to these personalities, the composer orchestrated the set in 1971, the version we hear on this disc.

Musically, the individual songs in these British Romances seem to be at expressive odds with one another. Some are somber in tone, some are quaint and folksy, while others are jocular or tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps these creative shifts in direction are due to the fact that the songs were written in widely separated installments over several months, from May to October of 1942. While lacking the organic unity and expressive depth of his best cycles, the affable warmth of these songs otherwise makes them a fairly attractive, unpretentious collection.

The jovial tune in the setting of Burns' MacPherson's Farewell is later reused in the Humour movement of the Thirteenth Symphony, where again, the verse gleefully mocks an executioner. The treatment is simple and extroverted, as it is in the final song of the cycle, a brief, delightfully madcap assault on the precarious rise and fall of kings. The fourth song is a folksy dedication to his colleague, composer Georgi Sviridov (who passed away 5 January 1998). With its short, repeated phrases and embellishments, it forms a clever imitation of that great vocal master's style.

The three remaining songs are of more serious content and are uncharacteristically straightforward and even-tempered for Shostakovich. The opening Raleigh setting has some lovely phrases, though it fails to follow through on a number of tentative gestures which are introduced. The Scottish rurality and placid warmth of the Burns setting which follows are supported by the droning, bagpipe-like pedals which form the accompaniment throughout. The fifth song, Shakespeare's Sonnet 66, contemplates the degeneration of human values and contains the pregnant lines, "art made tongue-tied by authority." Though it is the weightiest of the set, it still comes short of providing the cycle with a strong emotional anchor. The music, moving and hymnlike, climbs to a moment of measured intensity without pulling all the stops (much in the fashion of Cordelia's Song and the anchoring Intermezzo movement of the Piano Quintet of the same period).

These British Romances take up the moral and humanitarian issues which the composer increasingly would dwell upon in his later vocal works. However, as his earlier Pushkin Romances also indicate (as do almost all of his vocal music throughout the 1940s and 1950s), Shostakovich's artistic goals in the art song genre were still extremely modest. It should be mentioned that there are many more interesting passages to explore, both musically and satirically, in the pages of the unfinished opera, The Gamblers, which was composed contemporaneously with the British Romances.

With regard to the ambitions of Rayok, Shostakovich's artistic goals were quite clear. Rayok is ostensibly an operetta, a brilliant piece of musical theater, and a wicked send-up of the antiformalist campaign of 1948. The work follows a rather simple, quasi-vaudevillian formula of providing an uninterrupted sequence of arias, a mirthful medley of original and borrowed material. There are enough ritornelli, signature modulations, and Shostakovian distortions to impart a pleasing sense of unity. Yet unity is hardly the point of this melodious, biting and truly hysterical parody.

Chronologically, the next work on the Triton disc is the 5 Romances based on prose drawn from the satirical magazine, Krokodil. The text selection is almost totally arbitrary, deriving from one particular section (the 'Believe It or Not' column) of one particular issue of Krokodil. The verses are short, poker-faced nibbles of acerbic prose which offer commentary on the small ironies and discomforts of everyday life. They are both half-witted and street-wise at the same time. Once again, the composer identifies himself with the figure of the fool, here the hapless, randomly met clod expounding on the human condition.

For these spontaneous morsels of man-in-the-street prose, the presence of Mussorgsky-style vocal inflections in Shostakovich's settings is stronger than ever. In the opening song, Affidavit, a disgruntled bus rider vents his anger. The music's operatic treatment is marked by a smashing climactic peak and a sense of parody lined with dark, seamy corners. The only other song from this cycle recorded here is Discretion, a wisecrack about police brutality which moans gloomily around the Dies Irae theme. It is a blemish on this otherwise fine album that the remaining three Krokodil songs, lasting less than six minutes total, were omitted from Triton's programme, as they could have comfortably fit onto this 63-minute disc. The listener is otherwise directed to the complete version on a Saison Russe CD with Piotr Gluboky as soloist (RUS 288089); or better yet, Nesterenko's performance on Melodiya LP, which is still awaiting digital transfer.

The complete Krokodil cycle, in the last analysis, falls victim to the lopsidedness of its text lengths. The opening song is almost as long as the combined length of the remaining four, which are charming, witty, and all too brief. The cycle is thus too fragmentary and episodic to make a strong cumulative impression.

Krokodil is not one of Shostakovich's creative peaks. Yet, it represents the composer's return to the art song after a hiatus of five years. Along with his previous, brilliantly off-centered cycle, Satires, a more idiosyncratic attitude and style emerges in his songs, paving the way to the great vocal works of the final decade.

To some listeners, a number of Shostakovich's last works exhibit symptoms of exhausted creativity. Sometimes cited in this regard is his gentle swan song, the Viola Sonata. If the composer did indeed close the pages of his catalogue with a doleful whisper, his penultimate work, the Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, does just the opposite and lashes out with a bold, creative offensive.

For the last time, the composer adopts the musical persona of yet another fool. But this time, the projection is that of a degenerate soul ranting from the depths of depravity. In diametric contrast to the dignity of the Michelangelo and Marina Tsvetaeva verses which the composer had set within the preceding year (Opp. 143 and 145), these verses belong to one of the most obnoxious characters in Russian literature, the drunken Captain Lebyadkin from Dostoyevsky's novel, The Devils.

In these songs the music staggers erratically in the manner of the drunken sot it portrays. The symmetries of conventional song structure are subverted with a 'composed through' approach; that is, developing freely from beginning to end. With forceful theatrical conviction, the music moves along with abrupt motivic shifts and modulations, juxtapositions of highly expressive moments with those of deflating grotesquerie, passages of arioso which emerge unexpectedly from staccato, suddenly appearing flourishes and fanfares; even a "stop the music" spoken aside (shadows of Jimmy Durante) after which the song starts again from the top.

Unlike the musically abortive snippets of the Krokodil experiment, each Lebyadkin song is of sufficient length to flesh out a vigorous aesthetic space. Here, Shostakovich is at the height of his technical mastery, able to incorporate sharp episodic detours into the lyrical stream, move on to new material, and, by way of a certain alchemy, still achieve a satisfying totality. In this regard, one may draw a stylistic comparison to the jumpstart transitions which saturate the scores of the composer's youth, such as New Babylon of 1929. Nothing in Shostakovich's early scores, however, matches the solidity and deeply wrenching irony of this Lebyadkin cycle.

The second song of the cycle, The Cockroach, draws particular attention to itself. The verses in the remaining songs have identifiable points of expressive reference: in the first song, the Captain fitfully expounds about lost love; in the last two he rails parodistically against the aristocracy and political changelessness, two classic Shostakovian targets. However, The Cockroach is ostensibly about nothing whatsoever. For all the nonsense in its verse, the music's temper is raised to an implausible, bellowing volume. What's the catch?

Shostakovich was clearly thinking operatically. The purpose of the 'cockroach tirade' is to round out the character portrayal of the Captain, emphasizing the incoherence and disintegration of his personality. As an autobiographical statement, there is something unsettling and, in Shostakovich's own words, 'ominous', about the Captain's drunken stupor. It gives the composer license to hysterical outburst, perhaps releasing a masked cry of desperation and resentment over a variety of issues: the disintegration of his own state of health, the helpless isolation of his impending death, and all of the perverse values represented by Lebyadkin's verses.

There are more than superficial shades of similarity to the songs of Musorgsky, the spirit of whose Song of the Flea seems to hover in the vicinity of Shostakovich's Cockroach. Had Shostakovich lived another decade, he might have written the operatic masterpiece which is conspicuously missing from his catalogue, Lady Macbeth, regretfully, notwithstanding. One might even imagine these Lebyadkin songs as the highlights of that never-written opera. This farewell cycle may not be a masterpiece either, but it joins Satires and Rayok as the satirical highlights of his vocal music.

* * * *

A generation ago, Shostakovich's songs for bass voice belonged to the esteemed talents of Yevgeny Nesterenko, a classic Russian basso of impressive flexibility and theatrical swagger, virtues which earned him his leading reputation in Russian and other vocal literature. His recordings of Shostakovich song cycles on Melodiya LP are well worth investigating (a two-LP set of these recordings was variously reissued in the West shortly after the composer's death).

In the discs under review, Alexei Mochalov, born 1954, shows himself to be a worthy heir to this repertoire, which he has made something of a specialty. Mochalov's richly resonant bass is matched by a dramatic flare which is nothing short of charismatic. His ability to project both dramatically and comedically is evident throughout these performances. In the Lebyadkin cycle, for example, Mochalov is not afraid to seize the role and inject his own measure of campiness. In the performances of Rayok on each of these two CDs, Mochalov again demonstrates his knack for characterization by singlehandedly assuming each of the roles originally written for four basses. His talent for quick and precise articulation is called upon in the Fool's Songs from King Lear.

Listeners may be familiar with the aforementioned Saison Russe disc of 1995 which surveys five of Shostakovich's cycles for bass and piano, featuring the voice of Piotr Gluboky. The principal merit of that disc is its compilation of song cycles which are infrequently recorded, such as the two Pushkin cycles, and as already stated, its inclusion of all five Krokodil Romances. However, one need only compare Mr. Gluboky's sober performances of the British and Lebyadkin cycles to appreciate fully the dramatic spark which Mr. Mochalov and cohorts bring to their renditions.

In the nine years since it was rediscovered in the archives, Rayok has received surprisingly little attention. Rostropovich's lively landmark recording premiere of the work in piano score appeared on a now-deleted 1990 Erato CD (ECD75571), and presented a performance in the Russian language followed by one in English. Another performance in piano score with different Russian artists was released on Chant du Monde/Saison Russe in 1993 (LDC288 075), also deleted.

Now on each other's heels appear the premieres of two different chamber arrangements of Rayok, each one presenting the work's parodistic panache in a similarly colorful manner. The version on the Music Master disc is the collaborative work of one Vladimir Milman, and violinist/conductor Vladimir Spivakov, the latter of whom has recorded his own chamber scoring of other Shostakovich piano works, most notably the opus 13 Aphorisms (with Boris Bekhterev). Triton fails to identify its arranger.

Spivakov/Milman makes greater use of percussion, often in a campy, music hall manner where comic punch lines are punctuated with rim shots and the like. In the arrangement on Triton, one finds a fuller, more warmly recorded presence of instrumental color. The success of Rayok's production, however, rests not so heavily on the differences in these very effective arrangements as it does on the vocal performances of those involved, especially that of bass, Alexei Mochalov, who is the featured soloist in each of the performances. Conductor Anatoly Levin seems to elicit a shade more spontaneous merriment from Mr. Mochalov, who otherwise gives a command performance in each case. One distinct drawback of the Music Master disc is that it does not contain a libretto for Rayok, where Triton's booklet offers the libretto in both English and phonetic Russian.

The Music Master disc contains other music of no less significance. Pianist Julia Zilberquit's 1996 chamber arrangement of Shostakovich's Concertino, opus 94, brings a surprising new dimension to this little score. Zilberquit has transformed this originally two-piano work into a sparkling bravura piece for solo piano and chamber orchestra. The witty exchanges and lively contrapuntal interplay between piano and ensemble are the result of smart creative decisions. Appropriate to the work's elegantly drawn lines, representing the composer at his most French neoclassical, the scoring is light and airy, while still maintaining a sense of Shostakovian authenticity. Given the Classical dimensions of the orchestra with added snare drum, the work's period-bound idiosyncrasies are even more strongly suggestive of the nearly contemporaneous Piano Concerto #2, the score of which was very likely used as a guideline. Ms. Zilberquit, as both arranger and performer, has given birth to a real Shostakovich charmer (I am told that the Canadian Brass are performing their own arrangement of the opus 94 Concertino).

From Jewish Folk Poetry is indeed one of Shostakovich's finest lyrical inspirations. The performance by Spivakov and his Moscow Virtuosi compares well to the recent (1994) recording by Jarvi/Gothenburg on Deutsche Grammophon (DG 439 860-2). The Moscow vocalists may not have the polish of Jarvi's singers, yet their conviction more than makes up for their minor shortcomings in this department. A particular strength of this performance is the very close miking of soloists and ensemble, a feature which brings an impassioned closeness to this very passionate work. The more spacious acoustic in the Jarvi recording, on the other hand, brings to the work a certain grandeur along with its own considerable emotional clout. Jarvi's performance is one simply not to be missed. However, the vivid intimacy of the Spivakov-led performance earns it a commendable place in the catalog.

As mentioned before, these two CDs each have distinguished programmes and performances, yet their circulation will no doubt be hampered by their poorly labeled jackets.

The unusually hard-to-find Triton/RD disc bears the simple title, Songs. Given the programme under discussion, one might have chosen a more promotionally savvy title such as Songs of the Fool: Cycles of Satire in the works of Dmitri Shostakovich. Though the programme is listed on the jacket, nowhere is it indicated that the Lebyadkin and Krokodil songs, as well as the infrequently recorded Rayok, are world premiere recordings in their versions for chamber orchestra. What a missed opportunity!

Likewise, only within the enclosed booklet of the Music Master release, humbly titled Hommage à Shostakovich, do we discover that the performance of Rayok listed on the jacket is yet another world premiere; or that the Concertino appears in its unique arrangement as a world premiere recording.

One hopes that through reviews or a repackaging effort, these albums will be promoted and marketed in a fashion appropriate to their noteworthiness. Strongly recommended.

Louis Blois
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