Sorting Through a Slew of Shostakovich

If recorded output is an accurate yardstick, Shostakovich has become the public’s favorite 20th-Century composer. Whether or not he really is, the vast supply of his music must be satisfying some demand out there in consumerville.

Aside from giving us a good deal of valuable, previously little-known material along with an equal amount of questionable value, this largesse allows us to savor varying interpretive approaches.

The mesmerizing, death-obsessed Symphony No. 14, to poems of Garcia Lorca, Apollinaire and Rilke, has had considerable exposure since its 1969 premiere.

One of its early champions in the West, Leonard Bernstein, opted in his performances for a furious, unremittingly theatrical approach, extracting from it the last, agonized drops of irony and anger.

Bernstein’s 1976 recorded version is once again available (Sony 47617, mid-price) and it does not hold up well in the face of recent competition, notably that provided by the ubiquitous, omnivorous Neeme Jarvi, who directs the Gothenburg Symphony, shaping the score’s 12 individual numbers according to their discreet requirements (Deutsche Grammophon 437 785).

Jarvi’s small orchestra--only strings and percussion are required--delivers the goods at least well as Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic ensemble, with the former also having the better soloists: sweet-voiced (all the more ironically suited to the dark texts of her songs) Ljuba Kazarnovskaya and the virile, accurate Sergei Leiferkus preferable to Bernstein’s strident Teresa Kubiak and frantic Isser Bushkin.

Deutsche Grammophon accords the Symphony a worthy discmate (Sony offers none at all): Shostakovich’s strikingly apt orchestration of the “Song and Dances of Death” by Mussorgsky, in a performance of horrific splendor by mezzo Brigitte Fassbander, Jarvi and his Swedish instrumentalists.

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The composer’s two Violin Concertos appear on a CD (Russian Disc 11 025) remastered from recordings made in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory during the 1960s: a core component of any collection of recorded Shostakovich.

The soloists, whose work on both the technical and musical levels is so complete as to render criticism superfluous, are Leonid Kogan in No. 1 and David Oistrakh, to whom both concertos were dedicated, in No. 2. Conductor Kiril Kondrashin and his magnificent Moscow Philharmonic are equal partners in both.

The First Concerto (1955) has achieved popularity in recent years as a virtuoso vehicle, with plenty of snotty humor to balance its dark lyricism. The almost unremittingly pessimistic Second (1967) is even more of a challenge to its protagonist, but pays fewer crowd-pleasing dividends.

The composer wrote his score for a music hall extravaganza called “Hypothetically Murdered” in 1931.

Basing his orchestration on the composer’s surviving piano sketches for the otherwise lost original, British composer Gerard McBurney has constructed a suite with whose first recording a new British label, United, now introduces itself (88001).

It’s good, dirty fun, if not as high on the cleverness scale as the bad-boy composer’s supremely tacky Suite No. 1 for Jazz Band (1934), which is also included.

The program also offers the Fragments, Opus 42 and the composer’s own orchestration of his Pushkin Songs (1937). Mark Elder is the expert--even if, in the Jazz Suite, rather too buttoned-up--conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony in all four works, with basso Dimitri Kharitonov delivering the songs with touching simplicity.*