DISCS / Gift-wrapped death: Stephen Johnson and Edward Seckerson review Shostakovich and Philip Glass

SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No 14.

MUSSORGSKY: Songs and

Dances of Death

Ljuba Kazarnovskaya, Sergei Leiferkus, Brigitte

Fassbaender, Gothenburg Symphony

Orchestra / Neeme Jarvi

(DG 437 785-2)

THE perfect present for a depressive friend. First there's a stylishly black Songs and Dances of Death from Fassbaender, with Shostakovich's powerful but not too obtrusive orchestration richly animated by Jarvi and the Gothenburgers. The mother fighting a spiritual duel for her child, the grim serenader, the snow-seduced peasant and the final crowing of Field-Marshal Death are vividly theatrical and musical at the same time - a difficult balancing act.

Then comes a performance of Shostakovich's own death-fixated Fourteenth Symphony - the opening vocal phrase taking off with an uncanny similarity to the first line of the Mussorgsky - in which the emphasis is apparently on numbing fear and despair rather than shock-horror. Perhaps the Gothenburg strings could have been a degree or two more forceful - the climax of 'The Suicide' stops short of actual screaming; perhaps the pointing at the beginning of 'O Delvig, Delvig]' is a little over-careful; but after one hearing the eerie, achingly sad stillness of 'De profundis', 'The Poet's Death' or the opening thin lament of 'The Suicide' left a musical aftertaste that lasted the rest of the day.

Leiferkus is the embodiment of luxurious Slavic gloom in 'De profundis'. Kazarnovskaya is magnificent: the intensity of a Vishnevskaya, but with an intimate, concentrated pianissimo Vishnevskaya could rarely match. It's a pity one of her early phrases in 'The Poet's Death' was marred on my copy by what sounded like an editing blip (Track 14 0'39') - otherwise, technically excellent.

NOT so much a review, more a postmortem. You'll not find promises of salavation or intimations of immortality here: just finality, and the staunch acceptance of it. The Shostakovich was effectively born out of the Mussorgsky, the orchestrations like decomposed remnants of his dark, saturating work on the Songs and Dances. The female voice throws an interesting light on these songs: Death's 'Lullaby' is at once more comforting and more terrible for the maternal softness, the word 'Bayu' ('Hush-a-bye') aching repeatedly through the song. Death's love song ('Serenade') is similarly seductive, though even Brigitte Fassbaender's rasping chest-voice cannot lend the requisite weight to Death, The Field-Marshal's roll-call in the final setting.

The Shostakovich gets an outstanding performance, Sergei Leiferkus immediately establishing his concentrated, unblinking, almost surgical delivery, the dry cast of the voice chillingly mirrored in parched string basses. His partner in death, Ljuba Kazarnovskaya, knows restraint and inwardness in a way that some past practitioners have not. Her account of Apollinaire's 'The Suicide' is full of verbal insights, the last line played so intimately close to the microphone that you can smell Death's breath. And I like the way she sweetly, coyly colours 'On Watch', mindful of her 'little soldier, who will die before nightfall'.

Jarvi leaves nothing unturned in the spare, alarmingly resourceful orchestrations, from the leaping hot-wire violins of the mad 'Malaguena' to the lofty divisi cellos of 'O Delvig, Delvig]' Together these works are spiritual Godfather and son; masterpieces, both. ES

GLASS: Violin Concerto. SCHNITTKE:

Concerto Grosso No 5

Gidon Kremer, Vienna Philharmonic

Orchestra / Christoph von Dohnanyi

(DG 437 091-2)

THERE'S emptiness and there's virtuoso emptiness. Philip Glass's Violin Concerto is solidly (or should that be nebulously?) type two. I've heard things like the violin part many times bubbling and twittering out of practice rooms in music schools. If Glass had offered it as a set of harmonised arpeggio exercises I might have managed a little polite critical applause - a promising new idea in violin tuition perhaps. But he didn't. He calls it a Concerto.

He tells us that he is interested in Concerto form because it is 'more theatrical and more personal'. And yet the result is about as theatrical as an unpopulated merry-go-round - and about as personal. Some of it does sound quite pretty - but then I imagine Gidon Kremer practising can probably be rather nice too. The Vienna Philharmonic also play beautifully. What an incredible waste of resources.

It certainly made me appreciate Schnittke. The Fifth Concerto Grosso may be over-long and self-indulgent, it may strain to deliver the emotional body-blow, but there is at least a real, fully-formed musical personality here, with compositional processes you can follow, and then go back to and discover new angles and meanings. I think that's what depresses me most about Glass - you've heard it once, you've heard it all. Perhaps this kind of repetitive mood-music does have its place, but I can't believe that it's the concert hall. SJ

THE pulsing chords at the outset, like the flicker of some psychedelic light-show, instantly identify the composer; the solo violin's inevitable arpeggios are off and running in search of some music. Marginally more than usual is forthcoming: as Glass moto perpetuos go, this one generates more in the way of electricity and variety, percussion lending a theatrical kick, emphatic wide-spaced gestures from the soloist slashed across the stave. But with the slow movement's oscillating pianissimo strings and a stalking passacaglia theme, we are back to Glass, the auditory sedative. Again, the solo musings are innocuously hypnotic, a little like counting sheep hopping over barlines. It's only when the music stops - abruptly - that you realise just how golden silence is.

Whether or not there is more music as well as notes in the Schnittke is a moot point. Indeed, is there much more at work here than the machinations of a capricious mind? The melodrama is characteristically lurid, degenerate expressionist waltzes rubbing shoulders with queasy parodies of everything from Baroque to the Blues. Kremer is at his most insanely brilliant, flailing his way through the solo part, febrile cadenzas emerging from the climactic roar of amplified piano. And all the while a disembodied harpsichord is vamping away: Schnittke in another life?