Symphony No. 6 in B minor, op. 54[a]; The Execution of Stepan Razin, op. 119[b].
Valeri Polyansky, Russian State Symphony Orchestra, Russian State Symphonic Cappella[b], Anatoly Lochak (bass)[b].
Chandos CHAN 9813. DDD. TT 59:00.
Recorded Mosfilm Studio, Moscow, 18 June 1999[a]/Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, 14 June 2000[b].

It is scarcely possible to conceive of a performance of The Execution of Stepan Razin that erred on the side of excess - listeners, though, are hereby advised that Polyansky has come up with a performance that is as steadfast and insistent as the musical drama's iconoclastic hero. This Razin is pushed to the extreme and permeated with Shostakovian intensity. Some may find it over the top. But for those with a penchant for fiery executions, musical and otherwise, what a glorious specimen of immoderation it is.

Any new performance of Shostakovich's explosive cantata is cause to sit up and take notice. Since Kondrashin's 1965 premiere recording (Lys 568-573; deleted), subsequent listings in the catalogue have been scarce - only half a dozen, including the one under review - and not all have been equally successful.

The two previously most-recent versions represent the best and the worst of traditions. One, by Michail Jurowski (Capriccio 10 780, reviewed in DSCH No. 14), is a strong performance that will remain a classic for years to come. The other recording, by Andre Andreev (Koch 3-7017-2 H1), is poor because of, among other things, the thumpiness of its recorded sound and a soloist who croons the part as though it were Razin's cocktail hour instead of his demise.

Shostakovich's cantata, his second and last collaboration with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, at last seems to be getting its deserved place in the limelight. The work is important, partly for its politically charged payload, and partly for offering a glimpse of where Shostakovich might have taken his operatic career, aborted at its peak with Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and subsequently entering a cul de sac with the sadly misguided Gamblers five years later. Stepan Razin is arguably the closest Shostakovich came to writing another opera in the last three decades of his life.

The work takes the form of an extended scena depicting the public execution of the 17th century legendary folk hero, with a bass soloist in the dual role of narrator and Stenka himself. The chorus echoes the words of the narrator and the protagonist as well. The work underscores all the reference points of the composer's own real-life conflagrations: fist raised against oppressive authority, public betrayal and humiliation, and ultimately, a victory of the spirit tainted with the blackest irony. The pent up anger so explosively released touches a raw nerve like nothing else in the composer's canon.

The music that Shostakovich wrote in both of the Yevtushenko collaborations is tailored to the blunt, extroverted character of the verses themselves. This is particularly true of the music of Stepan Razin. In matters of interpretation, therefore, bolder strategies take precedence over subtler ones, a notion that Polyansky seems to have latched onto with a vengeance. While the bass soloist pursues the nuances of phrasing, Polyansky takes a firm grip on the music's throttle with the full support of the superb musicians of the Russian State Symphony Orchestra and Cappella.

If a performance of Stepan Razin lives or dies on the strength of its brass and percussion, then there is plenty in this performance to raise the dead in Novodevichy cemetery, including Stenka himself. The brass, first of all, show that they are capable of all the fury in hell's furnace. It is a distinction that is somewhat compromised during the course of the introductory episode where the brass, entering midway, almost totally obscure the final dozen of the chorus's twenty hair-raising glissandi. Though pushed a tad forward in this passage, their aggressive presence is otherwise welcome in the all-important opening bars, in the powerful culminating statements that mark sectional boundaries, and notably, in the shattering finale.

Another element in this rendition that will prove rather extreme for the mild-mannered is the percussion. Never before in Stepan Razin's history have the percussion section been recorded with such stupendous clarity and forward presence. Gong strokes swell and decay with long, plush resonance; the mighty strokes of the timpani and bass drum boom firm and solid; the staccato hammer blows that punctuate the piece constitute an exorcism in progress. This is the way Stepan Razin was meant to be heard.

But the feature that will most take the listener's breath away is Polyansky's choice of tempo; by all measure, this is the fastest performance of Razin on disc. Comparisons to previous performances help make the point: Polyansky 26:16, Jurowski 27:17, Kondrashin 27:51, Slovak 29:40 (Praga PR 254 055; deleted), Andreev 31:05, and Kegel 31:18 (Philips 434 172-2; deleted). Numbers, of course, do not a performance make. And it should be noted that the longest of these, under the scrupulous baton of Herbert Kegel, ranks among the most passionately eloquent of the lot.

In this performance, Polyansky's pace in the faster sections, especially the sections of regular rhythm, is pushed to the brink. From the opening bars, the music is brazenly taut and displays Polyansky's characteristic edginess. For example, after chorus and orchestra reach the first climactic peak in the opening five minutes, conductors generally observe the poco meno mosso indication in the score (Fig. 15), retarding the tempo in the instrumental aftermath as a kind of "catch your breath" post-climactic recovery. Polyansky takes a brief ritardando just before the indicated bar (4:38), but then breaks with tradition and proceeds to drive the brassy postlude with undepleted momentum. The effect is invigorating if a bit startling.

The spring-loaded quality of the performance is also reflected in the manner in which Polyansky negotiates tempo transitions. At the end of the long, eerie Adagio section just preceding the execution, where other conductors gradually speed up the music, Polyansky's tempo shift is sudden (Fig. 38-1/16:16). The same abruptness characterises other slow-to-fast sectional junctures (for example, at Fig. 30/11:14).

Still, the slower sections of atmospheric anticipation and extended arioso are unrushed and duly savoured. While it's not fair to claim that the interpretation has only two gears, fast and slow, I did find myself at times missing the slightly greater breathing room and judiciously placed rubato preferred by conductors such as Jurowski or Kondrashin. Polyansky's tempi, however, are quite effective in forging a unified vision of the work and sustaining its volatile tension.

The various bass soloists that have appeared throughout Stepan Razin's recorded history have brought to bear many different qualities. Artur Eisen in the Kondrashin performance is still the role model for all subsequent basses with his commanding authority. The performance I find most electrifying, however, is the one by Stanislaw Sulejmanow in the Jurowski recording. His volatility and teeming sense of outrage consummately capture all the boiling anger of Shostakovich and Yevtushenko's hero. The quality of the recorded sound on that Capriccio disc is not bad even compared to Chandos', and the performance is not one to miss.

In the current performance, Anatoly Lochak has a heft that is singularly fitting. He emphasises more of the lyric aspects than does Sulejmanow, and does so with an emotive quality that is rich with nuance. He also pays detailed attention to text.

In the presence of the broad strokes of the orchestral interpretation, almost all shading in this performance falls on the bass part. Lochak's is a uniquely personalised Stepan, one that brings to the part both the requisite eruptive quality and a surprising element of vulnerability as well. One feels in Lochak's reading not only Razin's outrage and defiance, but more than in any previous rendition, his palpable sense of terror at his impending decapitation. In this, Lochak elicits a dark pathos and humanizing element to the role of Stepan that immediately draws the listener in.

This, indeed, is a Razin to be reckoned with!

One of Shostakovich's most popular works today, the Sixth Symphony seems to have taken Soviet critics and conductors by surprise in 1939. It initially elicited lukewarm reviews from the critics, and, if one can judge from studio recordings made 20 years after the fact, its first conductors seemed wary of a Shostakovich symphony so relatively free of conflict. Unlike the neoclassical apologetics offered in his Fifth Symphony, here Shostakovich seems to have set out to defy expectations rather than meet them head on. Written at the end of a turbulent decade, the lofty meditations of its opening movement followed by two exuberant scherzi represent something of a retreat from troubled waters as well as from traditional form.

The opening Largo, the work's centre of gravity, is necessarily the focal point of discussion. Rarely have recorded performances of this movement been as fast-paced as those of its earliest interpreters, Kondrashin (13:26; BMG/Melodiya 74321 19847 2), Gauk (15:23; Artia ALP-167; deleted) and Mravinsky (16:02; BMG/Melodiya 74321 25198 2), each of whom overlooks the roomier ambience explored by later conductors. More recently, Temirkanov's 15:40 revives this early tradition (reviewed in DSCH No. 12; RCA Victor Red Seal 09026-68844-2). Of Russian recordings of the LP era, the most successful - and the one still waiting for digital reissue - is that of the recently deceased Yevgeny Svetlanov, the first major Soviet conductor to give the opening movement its meditative due (18:11; Melodiya C10 14899-900).

Among earlier Western recordings, Fritz Reiner's strongly defined interpretation remains a classic (Sony Classics MHK 62343). Leopold Stokowski, whose flair for gesture and mood would seem tailor-made for the Largo, provides a disappointingly pedestrian account in his 1968 recording (RCA Victor 09026-62516-2; deleted; see John Riley's Leopold Stokowski on Record in DSCH No. 12). It was Sir Adrian Boult's daringly protracted but superbly atmospheric 1960 performance of that movement (19:56; Everest EVC 9005) that led the way for other Western conductors to adopt much broader tempi, as we find in the luxuriously delineated Previn reading (19:08; EMI CDM 7 69564 2; deleted) and in perhaps the most elaborately pampered version on record, Leonard Bernstein's second (22:29; Deutsche Grammophon 419 771-2; deleted). Performances by Haitink (17:41; Decca 425067), Berglund (17:35; EMI CDS 7 47790 8; deleted), and Järvi (17:28; Chandos CHAN 8411) fall somewhere in between the tempo extremes.

In the current version, Polyansky takes the Largo at the broader end of the tempo spectrum (19:04), showing the same meticulous attention to atmosphere as he does in previous recordings of his Shostakovich cycle (note the opening movement of the Tenth Symphony). The long, reaching lines in the strings are shaped sensitively - if cautiously - at each turn, bringing a genuine depth of feeling to the climaxes and crescendi. The peroration at 6:00 (fig. 12 +3) is thunderous, though the trombonist veers off the beat during his prominent solo (6:06, two measures before Fig. 13) in the very same bar as the errant trombonist in the Previn recording. That small annoyance aside, the various solos by oboe, English horn, piccolo and flute are evocative if subdued.

This is a relatively relaxed Largo in which the music seems to flow from a rather distant spring. The trancelike moods of the latter part of the movement are conveyed, mainly by flute, almost as a series of steady whispers, as if some ultimate secret of the universe were being held at bay. The hypnotic sense of detachment so conveyed - quite different from, say, Järvi's Largo - is in the end very effective. One almost gets the impression that Polyansky sought to act as a neutral conduit in these pages, allowing the music to flow with as little intervention of the baton as possible.

The two faster movements that follow, Allegro and Presto, have often been criticised for their superficiality. However it must be said that they contain some of Shostakovich's most fascinating and inventive melodic turns. Conductors such as Bernstein and Previn take the Allegro at slower tempi and thus bring out that movement's rich tapestry of solo work - with no small sacrifice of its overall cohesiveness. Järvi and Berglund, on the other hand, prefer the excitement generated by faster tempi. Polyansky takes a median range of tempi in both movements, a choice that allows him to negotiate their kaleidoscopic shifts of mood with spirited momentum as well as admirable attention to detail.

As with the Razin performance, Polyansky's edgy choices of tempo are offset by a versatile control of dynamics and enhanced by thrusting upsurges of energy. The wrenching irony of the wide-interval melodic leaps in the Allegro do not escape him, nor does the sense of innocent exuberance in the ensuing fanfares, nor the nature-struck passion of the central climax, nor the melancholic disintegration of materials at movement's end. He may not get as much devilish glee out of the final Presto as Järvi, whose Sixth ranks first to these ears among digital renditions. Yet the performance is robust, the instrumental solos well executed, the climaxes superbly shaped.

The quality of the recorded sound is once again a pleasure. The climactic timpani solos in the Allegro and in the finale of the Presto stand out with uncommon clarity. This leaves me to nitpick only about the small but colourful tambourine part (starting at 2:36, Fig. 101) in the Presto, which gets a bit swallowed up in the mix. And one more thing: since the final track of the disc is over 26 minutes long, it would have been helpful if it were followed by a short, blank track so that points within the cantata could be accessed conveniently from both ends - an idea for future recordings.

The label can now be affixed: this disc offers a Sixth Symphony that will delight your heart and a Stepan Razin that will rend it. A very good pair of disc-mates, indeed.

Louis Blois
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