Marius Rintzler - Shostakovich: Symphony No. 13- Babi Yar

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Music reviews of Shostakovich: Symphony No. 13- Babi Yar

Music Review: Begins and Ends with the Toll of the Bell
Rating: 5 Stars

The first movement is so marvelously dramatic and so perfectly complements the text, that anything I might say would be superfluous. Shostakovich's talent for building "brute textures" here has full play, in music of searing directness and simplicity.

"Humor" is a heavy-booted scherzo for the second movement; a little too heavy perhaps, though it absolutely serves the text (rulers have commanded parades, demonstrating their might, but they cannot command humor, which is always a power of the people).

Where in his eighth symphony, Shostakovich wrote a symphony with two scherzi, here in the thirteenth, he pulls off two slow movements. The first of these, "In the Store", begins with a low-string monologue, establishing a long-breathed rhythm which is maintained throughout. Most of the movement is fairly quiet, like the lives of the Russian women whose strength and perseverance is commemorated in the poem, and who bore the brunt of the injustices and hardships of the Soviet era. A long crescendo builds to accentuate indignation at their treatment by self-interested merchants ("It is shameful to short-change them, It is sinful to short-weight them").

Such were the circumstances of his life, that Shostakovich refined the writing of gloomy music to an intense degree; the opening of the fourth movement, "Fears," with its seemingly aimless muffled tuba, grumbles in the percussion played so softly that you strain to hear them, a keening melody in the low strings, and then the men's choir coming in on a monotone, "Fears are dying out in Russia" ... in a way personally unfortunate for the composer, but artistically fortunate for the world, Shostakovich had been prepared by long years to write just such a chilling passage of musical understatement.

The last movement, "A Career" alternates between a tired, and almost strangely complacent, waltz theme introduced by the flute, and a bumptious setting of the text itself, so that when the bass solo and the men's choir are present, the feeling of the second movement ("Humor") is distantly recalled. But the bouncy music evolves into a fughetta, which turns edgy with the horn entrance; this subsides into a graver mood for the voices ("Those who hurled curses have been forgotten, We remember the ones they cursed"). The bells which opened the symphony come back, softer, the nostalgic waltz returns in the strings ... at the last, a final toll of the bell dies away into silence.

Marius Rintzler has a fine voice, and the chorus sound fine as well; their Russian pronunciation could be better, but is fair for the most part. The Concertgebouw Orchestra sound fabulous, and do the piece perfect justice.

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