Jansons and Pittsburgh in Shostakovich’s Eighth: A Monument to Circumstance
This is a strange disc—strange in its provenance, strange in what it reveals about the economics of classical disc circa 2001, and ultimately strange in how it captures both the best and the slightly cautious side of Mariss Jansons’s Shostakovich.
The Symphony No. 8 in C Minor arrived in 1943, that annus horribilis when the tide was turning but the outcome remained uncertain. Shostakovich poured everything into it: the first movement alone spans nearly half an hour, a vast tragic arch that makes Mahler’s "Adagio"s look positively succinct. The Pittsburgh Symphony, funded by the Emma Clyde Hodge Memorial Fund when EMI proved parsimonious, tackles this monolith with technical brilliance and—here’s where things get interesting—a kind of cultivated refinement that both serves and occasionally undercuts the music’s raw nerve.
Start with what’s unquestionably superb. The string sound in Heinz Hall is gorgeous, captured with immediacy that lets you hear the grain of the lower strings in those desolate cantilenas of the first movement. When the cellos enter at bar 25, there’s a weight and warmth that the best Russian orchestras achieve through sheer tradition; the Pittsburgh players get there through immaculate preparation. The woodwind solos—piccolo’s manic chatter in the second movement, English horn’s keening in the "finale"—are impeccable. Jansons shapes the long lines with intelligence, never rushing the architecture.
There’s a demon missing. In Kondrashin’s 1965 Moscow account (BMG), the motoric second and third movements don’t just drive—they careen, they threaten to fly apart. That’s the sound of musicians who lived through what this music describes. Jansons and Pittsburgh give us precision where we sometimes need a whiff of chaos. The second movement’s brutal machine-music is executed brilliantly but feels a touch… managed. The third movement’s sardonic march comes across as satire rather than nightmare.
The paradox? Those tragic sections—the first movement’s vast desolation, the "finale"’s hard-won repose—these Jansons handles with more genuine feeling than Kondrashin, whose objectivity can turn clinical. When the passacaglia theme emerges in the "finale", Jansons doesn’t oversell the consolation; he knows this is exhaustion, not triumph. The final pages achieve real poignancy.
The live recording brings no audible audience noise, though you can sense the concentration. EMI’s engineering is first-rate—better, frankly, than this penny-pinching label deserved to get on the cheap. The included rehearsal excerpts show Jansons as thoughtful pedagogue, contextualizing the work for modern players who didn’t grow up under Stalin’s shadow.
This remains a fine achievement, superior to most available Eighths in sheer sonic splendor and structural command. But it doesn’t displace the handful of recordings—Mravinsky, Kondrashin, perhaps Haitink—that find both the architecture and the abyss. Still, for a first collaboration between Jansons and Pittsburgh in this repertoire, it’s impressive enough to make one wish EMI had properly funded a complete cycle with this partnership.
They didn’t, of course. The label’s scattered, multi-orchestra approach to Jansons’s Shostakovich cycle tells its own story about the recording industry’s decline. This Eighth stands as both achievement and missed opportunity—which seems oddly appropriate for music born of catastrophe and compromise.
