Hope Out Of Despair

On the face of it, this could be rather a bleak disk but somehow it has an austere beauty and manages to affirm the resilience of the human spirit. The main work is Shostakovich's Symphony No 14 and this is supplemented by a preformance of his settings of Six Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva. There's a solid starry cast of the symphony too; The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra ( or at least as much of it as this chamber symphony requires ) conducted by Bernard Haitink with soloists soprano Julia Varady and bass Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. The Tsvetaeva settings are sung by contralto Ortrun Wenkel. It could be debated that the symphony is more of an orchestrated song cycle with eleven texts mainly on the subject of death. Written towards the end of Shostakovich's turbulent life, it represents a railing against the fading light but there is still a core celebrating humanity. The poignant theme is also carried over into the Tsvetaeva piece, especially considering the dismal fate of both Tsvetaeva and the subject of the final poem, Anna Akhmatova. Millions died and suffered through the carnage unleashed by Stalin, not to mention the seperate slaughter of WW2 but the individual cases help highlight the deep sadness of the situation. Shostakovich survived but his life was lived under the constant fear of it being ended at any moment on a whim and this edginess unsurprisingly feeds into his music.