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Uneasy Listening
5 years ago
TSUJII AT WHITE NIGHTS: Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto no.1; Shostakovich: Symphony no. 14
Nobuyuki Tsujii, piano; Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, conductor
https://www.amazon.com/Tsujii-at-Wh.....tv&sr=1-27
I bought this disc for what's likely to be the only video recording of Shostakovich's underplayed Fourteenth Symphony -- a relentlessly bleak song cycle about the finality of death for soprano, bass, and a chamber orchestra of strings and percussion. As other reviewers have pointed out, EuroArts's failure to provide texts, translations, or subtitles for a series of Spanish, French, and German poems translated into Russian is ludicrous; I've lived with this uncomforting music for years, but viewers encountering the symphony for the first time via this disc are SOL.
It's an excellent performance, though. Valery Gergiev, conducting the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra not with a baton but a toothpick (hey, whatever works), tackles a score that hears the world in terms of frenzy and inertia; his tempi are very deliberate, concerned with gradations of darkness, like a viewer examining a black-on-black painting under museum lighting. Soprano Olga Sergeyeva and bass Yuri Vorobiev sing these songs of mourning, madness, suicide, and impending doom with all the drama the settings demand. It's a very fatalistic form of Slavic melodrama, if you're willing to wallow in hopelessness for a little while (and every now and then, many of us are).
Sorry Nobuyuki Tsujii, but I'm just not in the mood for the Tchaikovsky piano concerto right now.
Nobuyuki Tsujii, piano; Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, conductor
https://www.amazon.com/Tsujii-at-Wh.....tv&sr=1-27
I bought this disc for what's likely to be the only video recording of Shostakovich's underplayed Fourteenth Symphony -- a relentlessly bleak song cycle about the finality of death for soprano, bass, and a chamber orchestra of strings and percussion. As other reviewers have pointed out, EuroArts's failure to provide texts, translations, or subtitles for a series of Spanish, French, and German poems translated into Russian is ludicrous; I've lived with this uncomforting music for years, but viewers encountering the symphony for the first time via this disc are SOL.
It's an excellent performance, though. Valery Gergiev, conducting the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra not with a baton but a toothpick (hey, whatever works), tackles a score that hears the world in terms of frenzy and inertia; his tempi are very deliberate, concerned with gradations of darkness, like a viewer examining a black-on-black painting under museum lighting. Soprano Olga Sergeyeva and bass Yuri Vorobiev sing these songs of mourning, madness, suicide, and impending doom with all the drama the settings demand. It's a very fatalistic form of Slavic melodrama, if you're willing to wallow in hopelessness for a little while (and every now and then, many of us are).
Sorry Nobuyuki Tsujii, but I'm just not in the mood for the Tchaikovsky piano concerto right now.
