The music is heard high above the fray

THIS is a time of long-sought vindication for the devotees of Dmitri Dmitryevich Shostakovich, whose 100th birthday is Sept. 25.

Not since the ballyhoo over the “Leningrad” Symphony during World War II has Shostakovich enjoyed a higher profile. His 15 symphonies -- not just the perennially popular Fifth -- are gradually finding a permanent place in the symphonic repertoire. It is now apparent that his 15 string quartets are the single most imposing body of chamber music of the 20th century, outpointing even those of Bartok and Schoenberg. His Second Piano Trio, with its searing Jewish-flavored finale, is programmed about as often as the trios of Schubert and Dvorak.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic just concluded a five-year survey of the symphonies and quartets and will launch a follow-up in 2007, “Shadow of Stalin.” Valery Gergiev will deliver a Russian viewpoint in five symphonies next month in the new Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall.

And Russia, which tormented and honored Shostakovich with cunning unpredictability during his lifetime, has just issued a two-ruble silver coin commemorating his centennial (this new piece joins a curious gallery of recent Russian coins honoring once-banned or denounced native composers like Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and Stravinsky).

But let’s look back just a bit to see where we’ve been -- to 1979. The Schwann record catalog -- then a pretty good barometer of the popularity and reputation of a composer -- shows that in July of that year, the number of recordings of Shostakovich’s music in print had stayed roughly the same or even declined a bit in the four years since his death.

There was only one available recording of each of his two violin concertos, two or three listings of most of his 15 symphonies -- and none for the Third. The Fifth actually showed a drop from 1975. Only the quartets, still little known at the time, were on a mild upswing, thanks mostly to the emerging cycle from Britain’s Fitzwilliam Quartet, and the first recording of the original uncensored “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District” had just come out.

The party line in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union -- and in the West -- held fast: that Shostakovich was a committed soldier of the Revolution who wrote parade-ground symphonies about Lenin, October and 1905. In Western musical circles, he was regarded as a “conservative,” not worth taking seriously because he failed to approach the shrine of serialism on bended knee. The withering epithet “bureaucratic composer” -- used in an obituary about his colleague Aram Khachaturian the year before -- could have also been applied to Shostakovich then.

That autumn, everything changed.

A book called “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich,” smuggled out of the Soviet Union and edited by Solomon Volkov, hit the bookstores. “Testimony’s” most publicized passages -- showing that the composer may have been a secret dissident, railing against Stalin and his henchmen as well as some of the composer’s own colleagues and the naive Western press, embedding codes in works masked as Soviet flag-wavers -- startled most Westerners.

The Soviets and many Western academics struck back at Volkov, particularly a coterie of Americans who tried to prove, with sometimes disturbingly credible evidence, that the memoirs were a fake. The Soviets trotted out a variety of figures, including the composer’s widow, to discredit Volkov. On Volkov’s side were streams of Russian emigres who vouched for the truth of the memoirs’ depiction of Shostakovich’s personality and musical life in the Soviet Union.

Even after the smoking gun hinted at in “Testimony” -- the hysterically funny, Stalin-mocking cantata, “Antiformalist Rayok” -- finally came out of hiding in 1989, the war continued.

Both sides were still at it as recently as 2004, with dueling books by Volkov (“Shostakovich and Stalin”) and the opposing tag team of Laurel Fay, Richard Taruskin, Malcolm Brown and company (“A Shostakovich Casebook”). As the smoke cleared yet again, “Testimony” had been hit hard but remained standing, for the doubters could not discredit the content of the book -- as opposed to the source. And all the while, interest in Shostakovich’s music continued to grow, as curious listeners drawn in by the politically charged debates found much greatness in this misunderstood man’s music.

For me, “Testimony” rang true from the first reading for one simple, intuitive reason: The book reads the way Shostakovich’s music sounds -- with all of its bitterness, sarcasm, bleakness, corrosive and weird humor, compassion, self-obsession and reverence for tradition. Contrary to claims that it’s just a cranky, anti-communist diatribe, “Testimony,” on careful reading, reveals aspects of a more rounded, all-too-human Shostakovich -- the depth of his feeling for his fellow Russians, his identification with the Jews that turned up in his music at great personal risk.

There’s a sense of the man as a tenacious if weary survivor who made his compromises with the regime to keep on working. Moreover, the rhythms and style of the composer’s attributed words are quite different from those of Volkov’s own preface to “Testimony” and his 2004 book -- and a lot more captivating.

I think there is another motivation as well for the growing interest in Shostakovich in our time -- the Mahler boom of the 1960s and ‘70s. Mahler was a bone-deep influence on Shostakovich, and as people came to appreciate the gargantuan time frames, sudden contradictions, huge mood swings and highly personal meditations within Mahler’s symphonies, they began to hear the same things in Shostakovich’s vast spaces. This was especially true in the case of the huge, Mahler-quote-loaded Fourth Symphony, which has caught on at last after a long period of neglect since its belated 1961 premiere.

Gradually, other hidden corners of Shostakovich’s output have reached the mainstream, broadening and deepening our portrait of him. Few realized that Shostakovich wrote some of the funniest music ever penned; his ballets and early film music are full of slapstick pratfalls and mockery. Even much later on, sandwiched between the terminally pessimistic final opuses, you can find one last outburst of satire, the “Four Poems of Captain Lebyadkin.”

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Etched in the scores

THE early avant-garde Shostakovich is also becoming better known -- and yes, late in life, he did use the 12-tone system toward his own ends. Esa-Pekka Salonen seems to have taken a shine to the visionary clouds of sound and wild dissonance of the Second Symphony, programming it at Disney Hall and the Hollywood Bowl and taking it on tour in 2002. Salonen has come a long way since being warned away by the former chief of the new music police, Pierre Boulez, who once told him that Shostakovich was “bad Mahler.”

Yet are we really closer to Shostakovich’s music now than before? The recorded evidence suggests otherwise. Listen to the recordings from Russian conductors of Shostakovich’s generation, Yevgeny Mravinsky and Kirill Kondrashin, or the next generation, Yevgeny Svetlanov and Gennady Rozhdestvensky. The music seethes, the swerving emotions carried to their extremes. Intuitive Westerners like Leopold Stokowski, Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy and even Morton Gould felt the fervor too in their own ways. These are the performances that pulled me toward Shostakovich when I was young and he was still alive. It was the music that first touched me, not the politics.

Ironically, today’s presumably politically informed musicians often smooth out Shostakovich’s edges, turn down the emotional flames, minimize the raucous humor, mistake dragging tempos for profundity. Three new recordings of the First Violin Concerto by young star violinists -- Daniel Hope (Warner Classics), Sarah Chang (EMI Classics) and Leila Josefowicz (Warner Classics) -- came out this year, and of the three, only Josefowicz makes much of an emotional impact.

But even she doesn’t approach the total commitment of David Oistrakh, the dedicatee, who squeezed a different color and shade of meaning out of every note. Vladimir Jurowski may be one of our most highly touted young Russian conductors, but his tensionless first movement of his new Super Audio CD of the Sixth Symphony (PentaTone) pales against the driven anger of Kondrashin’s, or the resigned blue funk of Bernstein’s Sixth, which in a newly released DVD (Deutsche Grammophon) went absolutely the other way with the slowest tempos ever while maintaining a hushed, tight grip on the structure.

Interestingly, in his absorbing lectures on the DVD, Bernstein doesn’t rely upon “Testimony” for support (this was 1986). Nor does he buy the idea that Shostakovich’s taunting wisp of a Ninth Symphony was a deliberate poke at Stalin; rather he speaks of it as a sendup of all pompous Ninths. Either way, his Ninth is delightful and dangerous.

This suggests yet another reason for our fascination with Shostakovich -- his ambiguity. That puts him in great company like Mozart (is “Don Giovanni” a comedy or a tragedy?), Wagner (is the “Ring” an adventure tale, an allegory about power or what?) or Mahler (is the Ninth Symphony a farewell to the 19th century or a peek into the 20th?). We’ll never quite pin him down, but we’ll happily spend decades trying.

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Ginell, a regular contributor to Calendar, wrote the chapter on Shostakovich orchestral and chamber music recordings for “Classical Music: Third Ear -- the Essential Listening Companion.”

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Five new interpretations

“The Tale of the Priest and His Worker Balda,” Suite from “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District.” Russian Philharmonic Orchestra, Thomas Sanderling (conductor) (Deutsche Grammophon). “Balda,” a wacky, funny score that Shostakovich wrote for an unreleased animated film, receives its first complete recording, coupled with a micro-suite of three circusy passages from “Lady Macbeth.”

String Quartets Nos. 3, 7 and 8. St. Lawrence String Quartet (EMI Classics), Hagen Quartett (Deutsche Grammophon). Strange that both groups chose to honor the centennial with the same program. The volatile St. Lawrence either goes for hell-for-leather vehemence and speed or slows to a crawl, while the Hagen offers more refined, subtle performances, but not without sharp rhythmic support.

“The Execution of Stepan Razin,” “October,” Five Fragments. Charles Robert Austin (bass-baritone), Seattle Symphony and Chorale, Gerard Schwarz (conductor) (Naxos). A sequel to the Thirteenth Symphony -- likewise with a Yevgeny Yevtushenko text -- “Stepan Razin” is a powerful, trundling cantata that ought to be better known. It is treated to a sumptuous performance by Schwarz.

Symphonies Nos. 1 and 14. Karita Mattila (soprano), Thomas Quasthoff (baritone), Berlin Philharmonic, Simon Rattle (conductor) (EMI Classics). This is one of the best modern Firsts, bristling with mischief, perfectly suited to Rattle’s man-child exuberance. Quasthoff is astonishing in the grim Fourteenth as Rattle luxuriates in unusually slow tempos.

Dmitry Shostakovich: A Portrait. (Naxos). A surprisingly thorough, budget-priced introduction for newcomers, chronologically tracing his career in excerpts from one of his first works to his last on two CDs. The set is framed by appearances from the composer himself -- as a pianist and as a speaker.

-- R.G.

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In the concert hall

Oct. 8: Valery Gergiev, Kirov Orchestra and Pacific Symphony: Symphony No. 7 (“Leningrad”), Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, 5 p.m.

Oct. 10: Gergiev, Kirov Orchestra: Symphonies Nos. 6 and 11, Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, 8 p.m.

Oct. 12: Gergiev, Alexander Toradze (piano), Kirov Orchestra: Symphonies Nos. 12 and 14, Piano Concerto No. 1, Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, 8 p.m.

Oct. 14: Jorge Mester, Pasadena Symphony: Symphony No. 6, Pasadena Civic Auditorium, 300 E. Green St., Pasadena, 8 p.m.

Oct. 22: Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble: Prelude and Scherzo for String Octet, Op. 11, Beckman Auditorium, Caltech, 3:30 p.m.

Nov. 13: Borromeo String Quartet: Quartet No. 3, Cal State Northridge Performing Arts Center, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge, 8 p.m.,

Nov. 14: Borromeo String Quartet: Quartet No. 3, Gerald R. Daniel Recital Hall, Cal State Long Beach, 8 p.m.

Nov. 15: Borromeo String Quartet: Quartet No. 3, Sinai Temple Main Sanctuary, 10400 Wilshire Blvd., 8 p.m.

Nov. 18: Enrique Arturo Diemecke, Long Beach Symphony: Symphony No. 9, Long Beach Performing Arts Center’s Terrace Theatre, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, 8 p.m.