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Shostakovich: Symphonies 3 & 15 - Kofman

Shostakovich: Symphonies 3 & 15 - Kofman

MDG Gold  937 1210-6

Stereo/Multichannel Hybrid

Classical


Shostakovich: Symphony No. 3, Symphony No. 15

Czech Philharmonic Choir Brno
Beethoven Orchester Bonn
Roman Kofman (conductor)


Symphonic Panorama
The next-to-last release in the complete edition of Dmitry Shostakovich’s symphonies on MDG traces the customary development from the wildness of youth to maturity. In his Symphony No. 3 the twenty-three year old composer paid homage to May First as an important symbol of the revolution; forty-two years later in his Symphony No. 15, his last such work, he seems to have wanted to recall the carefree years of his youth. The dazzlingly arrayed Beethoven Orchestra of Bonn under the conductor Roman Kofman presents this symphonic panorama to us together with the Czech Philharmonic Choir of Brno in the optimal SACD quality we have come to associate with them.

Bright Future
The young Shostakovich, like many of his contemporaries, regarded the October Revolution as “the spring of humanity,” as Pravda put it. When he composed his Symphony No. 3 in 1929 and dedicated it to May First, his music reflected the pure joy that he then felt while contemplating the bright future that communism held in store.

Later Fate
After political reality had repeatedly brought Shostakovich to the verge of despair, he concluded his symphonic oeuvre in 1971 with a “light-hearted little symphony” with some autobiographical elements. He himself called the first allegretto his “toy shop” and filled it with brass parodies and other effects. Things are not so light-hearted in the second movement, in which Shostakovich’s forebodings of death can already be detected. This movement is followed by a short scherzo with a fragmentary twelve-tone row and then by the finale, which begins with the fate motif from Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen and also contains other melodic allusions from the music world.

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