How To Sum Up Shostakovich ?

One of a series of starter double cd's under the title Panorama, this one concerns Dmitri Shostakovich. Not easy to give an overview of a composer like Shostakovich in a double cd set ( I have another in the series on Beethoven which is even more problematical ! ) but the standard of performance of the works chosen makes them excellent candidates for any collection. The first disk has Symphony No 1 and Symphony No 5, played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Bernstein and the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington DC under Mstislav Rostropovich respectively. Symphony No 1 was Shostakovich's graduation piece from the St Petersburg Conservatory and it already shows some of the typical contrast between pathos and melancholy and manic high spirits that categorises much of his work. The fifth symphony is maybe the most performed of them all ( the best ? an impossible call ). It's the one with the famous subtitle "a Soviet artist's creative reply to just criticism" and was written at the very peak of the cryptic dance of death that Shostakovich was involved in with the regime. Whatever the ambiguities one tries to read into it, the finale remains one of the most powerful in all symphonic music. Disk two is more of a curate's egg. There is the thoroughly disposable and ludicrously misnamed Jazz Suite No 2 ( saccharine waltzes in the main ) which together with Tahiti Trot and Romance No 3 are played by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly. The Hagen Quartet then play String Quartet No 11, a mournful set of miniatures written in memory of a friend, and thee disk concludes with the Piano Concerto No 1, soloist Martha Argerich with the Wurttembergisches Kammerorchester Heilbronn under Jorg Faerber. This work further illustrates the melancholic and the manic with the latter role often taken by the solo trumpet part, played here by Guy Touvron. Certainly a value for money release.