The Execution of Stepan Razin, op. 119[a]; Two Fables after Krylov, op. 4[b]; Intermezzi from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk - 1934 version[c].
Michail Jurowski, Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, Kölner Rundfunkchor, Godfried Ritter (choirmaster)[a], Helmuth Froschauer (choirmaster)[b], Stanislaw Sulejmanow (bass)[a], Tamara Sinjawskaja (mezzo-soprano)[b].
Capriccio 10 780. DDD. TT 50:07.
Recorded Philharmonie, Köln, 3 - 8 June 1996[a]; 12 - 14 February 1996[b,c].

It eludes this reviewer as to why a Shostakovich masterpiece of the magnitude of Execution of Stepan Razin has remained such a stranger to catalogue and concert hall for the past thirty-seven years. The dramatic strength of this explosive cantata should have earned it a prominence equal to any of the composer's symphonies. Shostakovich considered it a finer work than the contemporaneous Thirteenth Symphony, with which it shares stylistic and ideological affinities. In the midst of political controversies and speculative revisionism surrounding the composer, it is the one work that should have been a lightning rod for debate about the man behind the music. Yet, for reasons unclear, it remains one of the last of the composer's great masterworks to be widely disseminated.

From a political standpoint, it is not hard to see why to this day there has emerged only one Russian recording of Stepan Razin. The cantata dates from 1964 and is the second of two Shostakovich works that embrace the politically loaded verses of Yevgeny Yevtushenko. In the Thirteenth Symphony of the previous year, Yevtushenko's verses were used as explicit criticisms of the Soviet government, raising issues of anti-Semitism, living conditions, and oppression surrounding artist and ordinary citizen. In Stepan Razin, the story of the 17th century folk hero and revolutionary is used to dramatise another hardship all too familiar to the composer, the fate that often befalls those who seek freedom under the oppressive rule of tyrants. Like the Thirteenth Symphony, the authorities sought to hinder its première, and its one-time, thus nominal, appearance in the Melodiya catalogue is an understandable fact of the then prevailing regime.

Unlike Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky, Shostakovich's cantata does not fall into conventional movement-like subdivisions. Nor are there any extended arias or chorales, and thus, any easily extractable sections that would help to encapsulate or represent the work. Instead, Stepan Razin proceeds as a broad, monolithically unfolding dramatic scene in which there is constant interaction between chorus, bass soloist and orchestra, where common thematic material develops progressively, economically and purposefully toward punctuated climactic peaks. Such an open musical structure insists on being assimilated in no less than its entirety. As an additional challenge, the cantata offers little relief from a sustained state of heightened emotional tension, largely in the form of teeming anger and defiance. It thus places considerable demands on the listener and interpreter, and is certainly not a work for all tastes and tolerances. No wonder so few conductors have dared approach it.

There is something of a take-it-or-leave-it proposition to this music, strong, fierce, uncompromising. The Execution of Stepan Razin comes across like a volcanic eruption straight from the emotional depths of a man whose life and soul, like that of its legendary subject, had been profoundly betrayed. It is a work of enormous lyrical potency and burning conviction, a work quintessentially representative of Shostakovich.

Kondrashin's première recording of the work on Melodiya in 1965 (reissued in a 6-CD Kondrashin compilation, Lys 568-573) and Rozhdestvensky's 1966 Proms concert (Intaglio INCD 7371) remain the only Russian recordings on file. Only three other recordings have appeared before the current one. In 1968 Supraphon released a performance with Ladislav Slovak leading the Slovak Philharmonic and Chorus (digitally reissued on Praga PR 254 055 in 1994). Another LP followed on the Philips label in 1973, with Herbert Kegel leading Leipzig forces (reissued on Philips CD 434 172-2 in 1992). A nearly two-decade hiatus was only broken in 1990 with the first digital recording on Koch (3-7017-2 M1), a Bulgarian performance with Andre Andreev conducting the Varna PO.

The relatively recent pressings of Andreev and Slovak are marked by various shortcomings. The Slovak, surprisingly well recorded for its day, contains strong instrumental and ensemble playing, yet loses too much momentum to the typically deliberate tempi preferred by that conductor. Among the Andreev release's many drawbacks is its thumpy percussion and cramped studio acoustic, with the result that much of the cantata's essential grandeur is lost.

Each of the remaining three recordings is distinguished by various merits. The Kegel is a passionate account, sumptuously recorded, well shaped, and of the handful, offers the greatest depth of interpretive flexibility. And there is something fundamentally authoritative about Kondrashin's boldly driven interpretation, though its sonic clarity is the least desirable of the lot.

The current performance, part of Mikhail Jurowski's distinguished Shostakovich series on Capriccio, surprised these ears with the sheer electricity it generates, matching more closely than its predecessors the driving tempi and cohesive tension of Kondrashin's classic account. Aggression is an indispensable component of this brutally engaging score, and Jurowski seizes the moment with a raw passion and level of involvement that is admirably empathetic to text and subtext. The brass section breathes the necessary fire, launching the work with a firm statement of the motto theme, and likewise, the series of Hamlet-like (op. 116) staccato hammer blows (Fig. 22+7/8:02) that recur at various points in the score. The Kölner Choir give a crisp, firm performance. The chorus's chilling series of twenty rising glissandi shrieks starting at Fig. 12/3:55 - a singularly thrilling moment in the choral literature - are notable for bringing the first five minutes of the score to a blood-curdling peak. Slovak and Andreev get considerably less out of this crucial curtain raising section, which proves to be a point measure of overall performance quality.

The tutti passages leading to and including climactic points, such as the execution itself (Fig. 43/18:09), the crest just after the words "I die in vain" (beginning at Fig. 32+7/11:50), and the arrestingly apocalyptic finale, are utterly staggering. The all-important percussion in this highly percussive work sound neither withheld nor overbearing. Their charged performance is always in the moment and meets all expectations.

Central to this performance is bass soloist, Stanislaw Sulejmanow, whose markedly wide vibrato I found distracting in an earlier release of Shostakovich orchestral songs. Here, Sulejmanow rises to the occasion with a take-charge intensity that more than compensates for this mannerism. In fact, we have not had a bass who has brought as much heft and authority to Stepan Razin since Vitaly Gromadsky in the Kondrashin performance. Compare the Bulgarian performance on Koch, in which the more relaxed bass, Assen Vassilev, is situated so close to the microphone that he practically croons away the required declamatory vehemence. Not so here. Sulejmanow's inflections teem with defiance and outrage, capturing the pungent irony of Razin's calamitous ordeal as well as eliciting the pathos of the beautiful cantilena passages preceding the execution. He brings to the solo part a drama of arresting necessity, matching with full measure the impassioned force of conductor and chorus.

Two very attractive works whose scarcity is also disproportionate to their merit round out the programme. The operatic sumptuousness of the very early Two Krylov Fables demonstrates how eagerly and naturally prepared was the sixteen year-old composer for stage composition. Rimsky-Korsakov was evidently the model for these comely and resourceful, if slightly arcane, vocal settings. The first song, The Dragonfly and the Ant, is here given a very expressive, idiomatic reading by soprano Tamara Sinjawskaja. Her voice has a more pleasingly rounded tone than Larissa Dyadkova's on Järvi's recording of the work on Deutsche Grammophon (439 860-2), if it is not quite as strong as Galina Borisova's on Rozhdestvensky's rendition (BMG/Melodiya 74321 59058 2). Compared to Järvi and Rozhdestvensky, Jurowski takes these settings at markedly faster tempo, especially the second and longer setting for soprano and women's chorus, The Ass and the Nightingale. The latter in this rendition acquires more of a buoyancy and formal intelligibility than in Järvi's more malleable, atmospheric reading. The women's voices of the Kölner Choir perform with charm and liveliness.

The Entr'actes from Shostakovich's most famous opera have received scant few recordings over the years, either individually or as a collected suite. The most recent issues of the suite - one by Maxim Shostakovich on Supraphon (reviewed in DSCH No. 12) and another by Neeme Järvi, twice issued on Chandos - are drawn from the composer's 1963 revision, Katerina Izmailova. It is the same version used by the first specialist in DS esoterica, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, in a recording that turned up on Revelation in 1997 (RV10084) and in an elusive recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra at an Edinburgh Festival circa 1960s. For the disc under review, Jurowski has gone back to the original 1934 score of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk to assemble his suite, and may be the first conductor on record to have done so. While the two versions are marked by significant differences elsewhere in the score, the Entr'actes seemed to have emerged in fairly similar form, though subtle differences in orchestration are noticeable (for example, the first statement of the galumphing march tune in the opening Allegretto is played on solo clarinet in the Izmailova versions and by English horn in the Jurowski/Lady Macbeth version). Rather than being toned down, Järvi's Izmailova rendition with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra takes more liberties with the music's sarcastic turns, drives the faster numbers with a higher velocity that accentuates their wild edge, and gives a slightly more exciting performance than the one on the current disc. No matter, Jurowski's Lady Macbeth rendition has plenty of vigour and spunk. He does better than Järvi in the mighty Passacaglia, a well stirred reading that seethes and simmers toward its rousing climax. The boisterous movements have an enthusiastic stride and are well bolstered by the Kölner Orchestra's strong percussion section. As with the rest of the works on the disc, the recording benefits from clear, well-balanced engineering.

Though Stepan Razin is sung in the original Russian, the texts are provided only in German, French, and an errant English translation of the German that has many points of difference from the Russian text. A phonetic Russian and standard English translation, as the Andreev/Koch issue copies identically from the Kondrashin/Angel-Melodiya release, would have been preferable. A similar offering of non-Russian texts is provided for the Krylov settings, both of which are sung in Russian.

The bleak, icy landscape depicted on the cover photo of this album understates the value and importance of this issue. Jurowski's Stepan Razin fills a major, long-standing gap in the Shostakovich discography with a performance that is constantly absorbing, completely satisfying, and ultimately overwhelming. Not only is it the peak of Jurowski's Shostakovich survey on Capriccio, if nominations were being taken, I would place it among the top albums of the year and moreover, the decade. This is as obligatory as recommendations get. It will be interesting to see if other interpreters follow the lead and performance standards set by Jurowski in this indispensable recording.

Louis Blois
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DSCH No. 14.
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