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Conductor Ensembles ComposerNotes & Reviews:
This well-filled disc combines the first three symphonies by Dmitri Shostakovich, all written before the composer had reached his twenty-third birthday. The First Symphony was in fact the graduation piece that completed his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory, but to quote Mark Wigglesworth's own liner notes to this disc, "Shostakovich's trade-mark musical gestures are all immediately obvious. Nervous tension and sarcastic wit, passion and intelligence, contemplation and action, nobility and banality - all expressed with an economy of means that is simultaneously subtle and direct."The work was an immediate success, and soon gained worldwide recognition through performances by Walter, Toscanini, and Klemperer. "The Soviet Union had discovered its first international star, and the authorities proclaimed him as an exaltation of the new at the expense of the old."
The two symphonies that followed fared much less well, however, and are still rarely performed in concert. At least nominally, there is a political theme to both works - the Second Symphony was a commission from the State Publishing House to honor the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, and the Third, with its subtitle 'The First of May', was a celebration of the international Worker's Day. Both works end with choral finales, to texts which proclaim mottos such as "Labor, joy and song" and "Revolution, march with a million feet!", but the scores themselves proved too experimental for the taste of the Soviet authorities, and did little to enhance the standing of their composer.
This disc is the penultimate in what "could be the most important Shostakovich cycle of recent times" according to the reviewer on MusicWeb-International. Wigglesworth and his players in the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra have received great acclaim for their performances of the mature symphonies such as the Eighth or Thirteenth, "Babi Yar", and here offer us the beginnings, works which in Mark Wigglesworth's words "encapsulate all the musical ideas that were to remain present throughout the composer's life."
Sunday Times
This splendid Dutch band and chorus are persuasive advocates for the "socialist" Second and Third, but they shine in a by turns dazzling and soulful account of the ever-astonishing First.
The Guardian, June 2012
Wigglesworth's performance of the First Symphony particularly...seems intent on demonstrating how much that work does actually foreshadow what followed from the Fifth Symphony onwards...Wigglesworth and the Netherlands Radio Orchestra do a fine job in clarifying the tangled textures [of 2 & 3], and in making their choral finales seem a bit more than just propagandist doggerel.
Gramophone Magazine, September 2012
Wigglesworth coaxes a wealth of detail out of his players, and they respond with gusto and agility. These details are persuasive on the level of characterisation too, and the overall pacing is also well judged...Among many highlights are the lusty singing of the Netherlands Radio Choir - a more plausible impersonation of revolution-inspired workers than any I can recall from a Western chorus.
BBC Music Magazine, October 2012
I don't recall being gripped quite as much by this work as in this present recording by Mark Wigglesworth and his Netherlands forces. Their relish in the Symphony's vibrant kaleidoscope of characters and colours, all caught in a fine recording, hold your attention - even throughout passages that sound less than inspired in other hands. Wigglesworth and his musicians are alive to every inflection.
MusicWeb International, June 2012
These are gripping performances, reported in superb sound and if you want Shostakovich's first three symphonies in a package you shouldn't hesitate. Perhaps it helps that Mark Wigglesworth has recorded these early works almost at the end of his slowly assembled cycle; is he able thereby to refract these scores through his experience of the later works?
Recording information: Music Centre for Dutch Radio & Television, studio MCO5, (10/2006/10/2010).
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Works Details
Shostakovich, Dmitri : Symphony no 1 in F minor, Op. 10 - Conductor: Mark Wigglesworth
- Ensemble: Netherlands Radio Philharmonic
- Notes: Composition written: 1923-25.
- Running Time: 32 min. 24 sec.
- Period Time: Modern
- Form: Orchestral
- Written: 1923-1925
Shostakovich, Dmitri : Symphony no 2 in B flat major (To October), Op. 14 - Conductor: Mark Wigglesworth
- Notes: Composition written: 1927.
- Running Time: 5 min. 37 sec.
- Period Time: Modern
- Form: Orchestral
- Written: 1927
Shostakovich, Dmitri : Symphony no 3 in E flat major (The First of May), Op. 20 - Conductor: Mark Wigglesworth
- Notes: Composition written: 1929.
- Running Time: 12 min. 27 sec.
- Period Time: Modern
- Form: Orchestral
- Written: 1929
