Shostakovich & Britten (Decca Classics)
★★★★☆
The second cello concerto of Dmitri Shostakovich has by no means matched the primary in public attraction or soloist appreciation. Premiered on the composer’s sixtieth birthday, at a live performance the place he was proclaimed a Hero of Socialist Labour, the concerto is ambivalent each in which means and in its steadiness between soloist and orchestra. There are stretches the place the cello is left to seek out its personal method dwelling as an enormous orchestra sits idly by. Fairly probably a metaphor for Socialist Labour.
Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom the work was written, made a hash of its first recording and the work has, to some extent, by no means recovered. Each web page calls for the soloist’s dedication, however to what? There are back-references to the extremely profitable first concerto and periodic insertions of the composer’s Germanic initials, DSCH, as if to say, that is about me, my torments and one thing I can’t point out.
Sheku Kanneh-Mason surmounts these points with what can solely be described as relish. His love of the music is plentiful and his momentum permits the listener to display screen out the noises off and simply take heed to an excellent composer on the peak of his powers. John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London present precision accompaniment, holding again because the work turns wistful in its finale after which blazing it out with managed explosions. I believe I now love the concerto greater than earlier than.
Together with his sister Isata Kanneh-Mason, Sheku proceeds to provide contemporary and lyrical accounts of cello sonatas by Britten and Shostakovich, the primary sounding lower than generally buttoned-up and the second sweetly ruminant in a meadow of folkish melodies.
If this appears like anti-climax, it isn’t. The album is coherent in its part elements and persuasive in its musicianship. All that’s lacking is context. These works had been conceived in a test-tube of a catastrophic social experiment. One thing of that background must be heard, if solely in a sleeve word.
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Norman Lebrecht is among the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s an everyday presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Road Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning towards human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.