Six Poems by Marina Tsvetayeva for alto and small orchestra, Op. 143a[a]; Six Romances on verses by Walter Raleigh, Robert Burns and William Shakespeare for bass and small orchestra, Op. 62/140[b]; From Jewish Folk Poetry for soprano, alto, tenor and orchestra, Op. 79[c].
Michail Jurowski, Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, Nina Fomina (soprano), Tamara Sinjawskaja (alto), Arkadi Mischenkin (tenor), Stanislaw Sulejmanow (bass).
Capriccio 10 778. DDD. TT 56:53.
Recorded Studio Stolberger Straße, Köln, 17-19 June 1994[a,b]; Philharmonie, Köln, 22 & 27 May 1995[c].

Michail Jurowski has achieved some distinction as a Shostakovich interpreter over the past decade with his extensive survey of the film and theatre music on the Capriccio label. The series shows the conductor as a highly capable, sympathetic interpreter of the composer's, with an appetite for the esoteric and a talent prepared for larger challenges. The current recording takes him in just those directions as he again enters the formidable arena of the composer's orchestral song cycles. The disc under consideration features three works from this musically substantial repertoire, and is noteworthy for including the composer's most undeservedly neglected cycle, the Six Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva. The remaining two works, the British Romances and From Jewish Folk Poetry, have received a number of recent recordings that were reviewed in these pages.

In comparison to his earlier entries in the genre, Shostakovich brought a far more idiosyncratic musical language to the vocal cycles of the later years. This late blossoming style, with its dark insularity and subtle gesture, produced some of his best works in the genre. I have always considered the crowning peaks of this golden period of song writing to be the Blok Romances of 1967 and the Tsvetayeva Suite of 1973, both for their outstanding dramatic unity and profoundly inspired lyricism. While the former work has been recorded quite often, the relatively few recordings of the latter in the Western catalogue is astonishing. In fact, I have only been able to track down two other non-Melodiya recordings of the work in the digital era.

It is not surprising that Shostakovich, especially in the antepenultimate year of his life, was drawn to Tsvetayeva's deeply cynical, melancholic lyrics. As near contemporaries, both artists suffered under the same regime, her suicide on Russian soil in 1941 ending an all-too brief and neglected career. Their different creative paths were, nonetheless, united in exposing the hypocrisies of authority and its tyranny over artistic freedom. Shostakovich's selection of six of her now bitter, now satirical lyrics is patently self-referential in centring on the vicissitudes of the creative life. Four poems offer a uniquely shared perspective on creativity: creativity under oppression, that unrecognized, and that falsely honoured. The suite includes a poem each on death and innocent love, and ends with Tsvetayeva's tribute to the creativity of another Soviet artist, Anna Akhmatova.

In these verses Shostakovich would find a dark pungency and uncommon strength of inspiration, deploying his gestural language to maximum expressive effect. The verses are treated with remarkable detail, the musical phrases tailored to each line with meticulous inflections of dynamics and mood. Morbidity, sarcasm, vacuous heraldry, solemn reflection, and agitation, are vividly interwoven into a magnificently conceived web of structural solidity combined with spontaneous passion.

It is the kind of music that demands the utmost involvement on the part of its performers and that is exactly what it receives on the current recording. I was immediately impressed with the sense of unity and commitment that both conductor Jurowski and alto Tamara Sinjawskaja bring to the work. Ms. Sinjawskaja's emotional involvement is the defining strength of her performance, one that must be accepted, unfortunately, with an occasional throatiness in her vocal tone that I did not find at all obtrusive. She rises to the volatile crescendi in the opening In My Poems, and negotiates the dramatic dynamic shifts in Hamlet's Dialogue with much effect. She convincingly brings off the sarcasm veering on pain in the pompously declamatory Poet and Czar, and her sustained level of heightened expression in the final setting, Anna Akhmatova, is also moving. This is a performance that, to my ears, fares preferentially with the competitive recording with alto Elena Zaremba on Volume 2 (1995) of the complete song cycles with Neeme Järvi and the Gothenberg SO (DG 447 085-2). Ms. Zaremba may have the more polished vocal facility, yet the synergy between her and Järvi does not have the same grit and spontaneity as found between soloist and conductor on the current disc.

The current performance of From Jewish Folk Poetry follows a number of fine performances that have appeared on CD recently. One in particular that has become a standard of performance excellence is the one by Järvi and cohorts on DG (439 860-2). Järvi's soloists again have the more polished voices in a performance that is powerfully expressive and a degree or two more nuanced than the current one. However, the Jurowski reading has its own set of checkpoints that make it one with a memorable personality. The vocalists are quite good and in complete concert with Jurowski's demonstrative gestures and detailed conception. If none of the vocalists are terribly distinctive, they are duly expressive as an ensemble of three and offer a committed performance that I have found satisfying on each listening.

The Six Romances on English Poets have also had a number of recent recordings of merit. The warmth and ingratiating charm of its lyricism has made this the most frequently recorded orchestral cycle after From Jewish Folk Poetry, and it was one of the composer's own favourites. Bass Stanislaw Sulejmanov adopts the appropriate operatic posture with these songs, whose colourful arioso passages offer the soloist a variety of dramatic opportunities. He breathes a fair amount of life into their now humorous, now pastoral, now meditative moods. Unfortunately, I was distracted here and there by Mr. Sulejmanov's slightly unstable intonation, especially in the songs with more broadly drawn notes such as Shakespeare's Sonnet 66, and conspicuously in the final held note of the last song, MacPherson's Farewell. His dramatic presence earns him compensatory points, and he is admirably assisted by conductor Jurowski's lively instrumental interpretation.

The cumulative strength of this recording owes as much, if not more, to the vitality and interpretive flair of Jurowski's baton as it does to the various vocalists. His fine Kölner instrumentalists have a strong ensemble sound with distinctive solos by fine individual players that do well with the close miking they receive. The sound engineering also provides excellent distribution and registration of individual instruments. The synergy of Jurowski's superb take-charge interpretation combined with cooperative, if not the most polished, vocalists, and the well turned reading of the Tsvetayeva Suite, earn this release a definitive "well worth hearing" recommendation.

Louis Blois
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DSCH No. 12.
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