Octo_Russ

Shostakovich - Symphony 6 [Haitink-Concertgebouw Orchestra]

I haven't played this disc for quite some time, in fact i don't play a lot of Shostakovich's Symphonies all that often, only the Fifth and the Tenth get decent play, so it's good to re-familiarize myself with these two Symphonies, the Sixth is fairly short by Shostakovich standards, just over 30 minutes, and is cast in the unusual three movement structure, it does have a huge first movement, which is longer than the other two put together.

Bernard Haitink is Dutch, born in 1929, he's now in his eighties, he was with the Concertgebouw Orchestra for many years, and recorded for the Philips, Decca, and EMI labels extensively, including many full cycles of Symphonies, including a full Shostakovich cycle in the eighties, this is where the reissue of these discs come from, these Decca Ovation discs are not good visually, i think they're a poor idea, but sonically the music is great, there is just a hint that Haitink can be a bit bland, Shostakovich is quirky by nature, and a degree of extremeness works with this Composer, Haitink can be very conventional, and sometimes slow, the music can lose its bite, i was troubled by Haitink's interpretation of the Eighth Symphony, a degree of blandness and somewhat boring, but maybe the fault lies somewhat with Shostakovich himself.

I very much enjoyed the first movement of the Sixth Symphony today, the beginning sounds very similar to the start of the Tenth Symphony in a way, sour and solemn, if i were to assign a word to this movement, it would be 'bleak', near the beginning there's this one pizzicato bass note [1:54+], that seems to start the Symphony off proper, low and high sad strings weave their magic, there's a tremendous section slightly later, a lone trumpet plays the main theme [5:07+], while the frantic strings screech out high in the treble [5:15+], but go down the scale in stages, lots of timpani and brass here, and become a low brooding tremolo, the bass pizzicato re-enters [5:54+], and it's this lovely backdrop of tremolo strings and pizzicato bass heartbeats, that a bleak cor anglais solo appears [5:54-6:45], very effective, and very atmospherically Shostakovich, the trumpet finishes what the cor anglais started [6:48-6:57], a sad and lonely trumpet solo, this is probably the best section of this movement [5:07-6:57], later there's a ghostly flute [12:40+], and out of this grows a sustained glockenspiel ring [13:10-14:04], and the brass uses this canvass to paint an autumnal refrain [13:18+], this is just some of the wonderful things i notice on this listen, Shostakovich's Symphonies have a depth if you care to dig and find out!.

Here's Semyon Bychkov conducting the first movement on YouTube.