Shostakovich Edition - Box Set 49CDs

 

Label : Brilliant

Format : Flac (image + cue)

Cover : Yes

It may almost certainly be the most dauntingly extensive survey of Shostakovich's music so far issued as a single set, but Brilliant Classics' compilation isn't quite comprehensive. Though it includes the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk – in the recording conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich with Galina Vishnevskaya in the role of Katerina Ismailova and Nicolai Gedda as Sergei, which for sheer dramatic intensity remains the finest on disc – Shostakovich's first opera, The Nose, is conspicuously missing. But almost every other major work is here, and many minor ones, too, with the symphonies and string quartets providing the spine.

The recordings of the symphonies come from concerts by Rudolf Barshai and the Cologne WDR orchestra in the mid-1990s, the quartets from the Flemish Rubio Quartet. If the latter are sometimes a bit austere and under-characterised, Barshai's accounts of the symphonies can be very fine indeed, especially the later ones. Only the First (a bit overblown for my taste), the Fourth (lacking real expressionist punch), Seventh (rather scrappy) and 15th (routine and uninvolved) are real disappointments, but on the plus side the performances of the Sixth, Ninth, 11th and 13th are as good as any. Barshai also conducts two discs containing the five chamber symphonies that he arranged from the string quartets.

Accompanying notes are minimal, and no texts are provided, though they are available on the Brilliant Classics website. If some of the best-known works can be found elsewhere in more consistent performances (the concertos, especially, are a bit of a let-down), some of the pieces here, such as the songs and the film music, will be much harder to track down, and there's a final disc of recordings of Shostakovich himself, as soloist in the two piano concertos. As an introduction to the sheer range of one of the most popular of all 20th-century composers, this set is hard to beat.

Tracklist : Shostakovich Edition