Shostakovich- Symphony No. 11- The Year 1905

Product Description Charismatic young conductor Vasily Petrenko launches his Shostakovich Symphonies series with the Eleventh , a highly charged depiction of the 'Bloody Sunday' massacre of over two hundred peaceful demonstrators by Czarist soldiers outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in 1905. Scored for a sizeable orchestra of triple woodwind, four horns, three each of trumpets and trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, celesta, harps and strings, the Symphony makes extensive use of revolutionary songs as thematic elements, as it progresses, without pause, from the glacial opening movement, Palace Square, to the terrifying massacre and its aftermath, The Ninth of January, the funereal third movement, Eternal Memory, and the final movement, The Tocsin, which culminates with cataclysmic bell strokes. Review Written to commemorate the abortive 1905 revolution Shostakovich's 11th Symphony, like the 12th which commemorates the 1917 revolution, lacks the weight or distinction of musical thought and logic which so characterizes the 10th and 13th Symphonies. What we forget, I think, is that the composer is writing in a popular idiom so as to reach as many people as he can. There is nothing wrong in being popular - for too long this has been seen as weak work and not a desire to communicate. As he was writing with regard to important events in Russian history I can well imagine that Shostakovich wanted to reach as many members of the public as he could with his music. But make no mistake - the 11th Symphony is in no way an easy listen; you can't sit back and bask in the colourful orchestration and good tunes. Playing for nearly an hour, in four big movements, which run together and share material, some of them revolutionary songs, there is something cinematic about the way the piece is constructed - but this is because of the way Shostakovich cuts between ideas and creates quite vivid visual images; indeed there is one section in the second movement (at 10:58) which always reminds me, for reasons I cannot explain, of the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin - perhaps Naxos could be persuaded to record Edmund Meisel's fine score for this film, for it warrants further hearings. The first movement - Palace Square - is the calm before the storm. All is quiet, the music is restrained and delicate, soft string chords, quite beautiful