SHOSTAKOVICH: Festive Overture, Op. 96; GLAZUNOV: Chant du menestrel, Op. 71; RACHMANINOV: The Bells, Op. 35; Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14; MUSSORGSKY: Entr’acte IV from Khovanschina (orch. Stokowski) – Wen-Sinn Yang, cello/Lyubov Petrova, soprano/Andrei Popov, tenor/Sergei Leiferkus, baritone/The Moscow State Chamber Choir/Russian National Orchestra/Jose Serebrier – Warner Classics 2564 68025-5, 59:39 [Distr. by Naxos] ****:
Recorded live at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, 2 April 2010 as the closing concert of the First International Rostropovich Festival, this fine disc captures Jose Serebrier at the helm of a variety of Russian works, several of which testify to his cultural lineage to Leopold Stokowski. In the case of the Mussorgsky selection, the descent comes directly as a result of Stokowski’s own arrangement of the original score.
Serebrier, himself a master colorist, opens with the 1954 Festive Overture of Shostakovich, written to commemorate the 1917 October Revolution. Pungent fanfares and brisk string playing keep this hearty piece in motion, a natural crowd-pleaser, as we can hear in the many bravos as the conclusion. Glazunov’s Minstrel’s Serenade (1900) makes a direct appeal to the memory Mstislav Rostropovich, an ardent performer of this brief but tender work. The sweet sounds of Yang’s cello play off against the orchestra’s oboe for some elegiac sentiments.
In 1913 Rachmaninov decided to set Poe’s “The Bells” for large chorus, soloists, and orchestra, the words having been arranged by Konstantin Balmont to suit Rachmaninov’s purposes. Rachmaninov dedicated the large-scale piece to a master of the idiom, Willem Mengelberg. Tenor Popov calls us to listen to the silver bells of infancy and youth, the chorus singing or humming a paean to a time of dreams and visions of pure possibility. The second movement, Lento, hints at the ubiquitous Dies Irae, and its long orchestral prelude, with its rocking rhythm, recalls the Isle of the Dead, Op. 29. Soprano Petrova joins the chorus for an invocation to golden wedding bells, despite the buzzing of the Latin trope in the strings and high woodwinds and horns. For the diabolic Presto (scherzo), Serebrier employs the original version of the score, the most urgent and demanding challenge–in its merciless metric shifts and pitch adjustments–to the chorus proper, which must embrace the brazen bells of mortal warning and terror. Rachmaninov has fused his Russian dreamer’s spirit to the Berlioz penchant for grotesquerie. The Lento lugubre of the last movement ushers in Poe’s reflections of death in the form of iron bells. The English horn figures in a weaving processional later interspersed with various “fate” motifs in strings, tympani, and cymbals. Baritone Leiferkus sings with the chorus a plaint as haunted as Orff’s homage to the cooked-black swan in Carmina Burana. The last pages, however, clearly achieve an illumination, an organ-tinted apotheosis to which the Russian audience responds fervently.
Ever since Stokowski’s shattering recording of the Entr’acte from Khovanschina, Act IV (RCA LM 1816), this music has held us in thrall, and Serebrier knows better than to adjust perfection, utilizing Stokowski’s version for his contemporary concert. A grim tortured portrait of an impending execution, the music captures the remorse and bittersweet memories of a man who ponders death and flight at once. Finally, Serebrier himself retouched the famous Vocalise of Rachmaninov as a string serenade “with very few instruments besides the strings,” to achieve an extended flowing moment of elegiac bliss. A solo cello adds to the intimacy of the occasion.
–Gary Lemco
