Rozhdestvensky has always been something of a difficult case to argue. The man is undeniably brilliant — mercurial, willful, capable of illuminating a score in ways that make you hear it as if for the first time — and yet those same qualities can tip, without warning, into willfulness for its own sake, into eccentricity that serves the director rather than the composer. With Shostakovich, that tension is particularly charged. This is music that demands both ferocity and discipline, that carries real historical weight — the Leningrad Symphony was literally broadcast under siege, its score flown into the city — and yet responds badly to being merely dramatized from the outside.
These performances, drawn from concert appearances and from earlier work with the USSR State TV and Radio Symphony Orchestra, offer a rather different picture than the famous Olympia studio cycle that many collectors came to know in the early CD years. That cycle was a revelation of sorts, and a provocation. Where Bernard Haitink — whose own complete Shostakovich traversal on Decca stood as the obvious rival — brought a Northern European sobriety, a symphonic evenhandedness, to this repertoire, Rozhdestvensky came at it sideways. The Olympia recordings, with their aggressive close-miking and spotlit solo lines, made the music sound almost theatrical, each instrumental voice yanked forward like a witness called to testify. You could find it riveting or you could find it exhausting, and on different days, honestly, both reactions seemed legitimate.
What’s immediately striking about the concert recordings here — those made with the Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra — is how much more natural they feel. The acoustic opens up. The strings breathe. You hear the orchestra as an organism rather than as a collection of separately illuminated specimens. The supposed Stalin portrait in the Symphony No. 10 in e minor’s second movement, that hammering Allegro that the musicologist Solomon Volkov’s controversial Shostakovich memoir helped turn into a kind of ideological shorthand, emerges with genuine demonic momentum — not the artificially pumped ferocity of the studio version, but something that feels earned, dangerous, closing in on you from the full width of the hall.
The slow approach to the notorious march episode in the Symphony No. 7 in C’s first movement is characteristic Rozhdestvensky — deliberate, almost sardonic. He’s always understood the grotesque streak in Shostakovich, the way a passage can be simultaneously funny and horrifying, the way the music mocks what it depicts even while depicting it with terrible accuracy. Shostakovich himself was famously evasive about what the march “meant,” and Rozhdestvensky’s pacing here keeps that ambiguity alive, refuses the easy martial pound that lesser conductors settle for.
The older recordings with the State TV and Radio Orchestra, though, tell a different story. The sound is thinner, the ensemble less tightly focused, and the sheer physical impact Rozhdestvensky could generate in the studio simply doesn’t come through. The Leningrad Symphony suffers most — it’s a work that needs mass, cumulative pressure, a sense of something enormous bearing down. You feel the absence.
The Symphony No. 9 in e-flat — that deliberately deflating postwar joke, Shostakovich’s refusal to write the triumphal ninth symphony Stalin expected — fares better. The music’s impudence suits Rozhdestvensky’s temperament exactly, and the Ministry of Culture players dispatch its neo-classical cheek with something close to glee. The bassoon solos have just the right nasal impertinence. This is a reading that understands the courage required to be funny in 1945.
The Michelangelo Suite, op. 145, is another matter entirely. This late song cycle for bass and orchestra, one of Shostakovich’s last completed works, is music of extraordinary bleakness and grandeur — the old composer, ill, politically compromised, staring at death through the lens of Renaissance poetry. Evgeny Nesterenko brings a bass voice of tremendous authority and dark coloring; if his interpretive manner is occasionally more monumental than searching, the sheer sonic presence is formidable, and the orchestral playing here achieves a desolate spaciousness that the earlier recordings rarely manage.
The Bolt ballet suite — early Shostakovich, satirical, brash, full of mechanistic energy — is given with obvious relish, and serves as a useful reminder of how many different composers inhabited this one relentlessly productive man.
As a collected document of Rozhdestvensky’s Shostakovich, this set is valuable, and the concert recordings in particular represent a meaningful upgrade in naturalness over the old Olympia issues. But it isn’t a first choice for any of these works. For the Leningrad Symphony alone there are at least three performances — Mravinsky’s legendary 1953 disc among them, Bernstein’s 1962 Carnegie Hall performance — that render the work’s terror and its endurance more completely. And for the Symphony No. 10, Karajan’s 1966 Berlin recording remains, for all its apparent ideological improbability, one of the most searching accounts on disc.
Rozhdestvensky illuminates. He also, sometimes, gets in the way. Here, the balance tips toward illumination more often than not — which, given the competition, is enough to make these discs worth knowing.
