Search - Dmitry Shostakovich, Spoken Word, Artur Rodzinski :: Shostakovich: Symphony No. 8

Amazing, revealing document

Starry Vere | Silver Lake OH USA | 09/13/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It is often said that earlier Soviet recordings of Shostakovich have a special authenticity, but this CD proves that some earlier American performances have it, too. There is an urgency and directness heard here that makes a lot of more recent performances sound a bit too comfortable, eloquent though they may be. The NY Phil-Symphony sounds right on it, having few difficulties with Rodzinski's taut, fairly quick reading. There's a super-fleet 2nd scherzo and a great payoff at the end, when the meandering nightmare of a slow movement suddenly stands in awe as the sun quietly rises in C major, a great moment. Sound is not bad for a 1944 aircheck and the radio announcer's message is revealing. He mentions that the 8th had its first NY performance a year earlier and was being repeated due to popular demand. Now, as we know, it didn't get played again in the West for quite a while. What do you suppose could have happened after 1944?"

An unexpected historical finding!

Hiram Gomez Pardo | Valencia, Venezuela | 01/15/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I have always been convinced about the artistic grandness of Rodzinski as conductor, who has never disappointed me about any score he performed. But the satisfaction was far beyond all the unthinkable and I will tell you why.



From the broadcast of October 1944 by the New York Philharmonic under magisterial Rodzinski's conduction, we are before a milestone recording. Recorded ten months before the end of the WW2, this performance was so incisive, penetrating and breathtaking that once you have listened, hardly you will be able to forget it, not only by the fierce astringency, the impressive musculature, the overwhelming phrasing, due it carefully describes the aridness, the horror, the hopeless, the bloody circumstances that surrounded it. The astonishing rubato in the famous Third Movement, in which the shrilling strings are a sharp metaphor of the human voices in the battlefield, I have always associated it with Munch's masterpiece, "The scream."



As a matter of fact, before the tonal expressive opulence given by Haitink conducting the Concertgebouw or the fervently patriotic exaltation of Kondrashin conducting the USRR Orchestra, Rodzinski makes a true existential journey to the very core of the score, giving as result the most vigorous and extraordinary version of Shostakovich's Eighth, in years until this date.



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