The 19-disc box set includes all the Shostakovich symphonies, the six major concertos, Lady Macbeth, and incidental music to Hamlet and Lear. It follows a cycle of live performances under Andris Nelsons that the BSO began in 2015. Marco Borggreve photograph
On Aug. 9, 1975, after intermission, conductor Mstislav Rostropovich announced to the Tanglewood audience that Shostakovich had died.
Over 50 years the Boston Symphony Orchestra has only grown closer to Shostakovich’s music, and its comprehensive project to perform and record all the large-scale compositions, just winding down this month, proves it.
From 2022: Yuja Wang performs one of the Shostakovich piano concertos at Symphony Hall. Aram Boghosian photograph
The BSO’s live performances of Shostakovich’s symphonic cycle began in 2015, and the 2016 and 2017 Deutsche Grammophon releases both won Grammies. This month’s release of the complete box set, along with the orchestra’s month-long Decoding Shostakovich festival of concerts and talks, followed additionally by a European tour, brings the cycle to a close.
No composer of his century matches Shostakovich’s output. Completing the cycle with outstanding soloists—concertos with Yo-Yo Ma, Yuja Wang and Baiba Skride—epitomizes this deep investigation into Shostakovich’s voluminous work. That investigation was fashioned by conductor Andris Nelsons’s close readings and emotional connections. Nelsons has had his own renaissance with the BSO as he passes his tenth anniversary, and a box set commemorating the cycle seems fitting.
It’s got to be good business. DG has a couple Grammies in the office foyer from the previous releases already, which I was happy to review back then for WBUR. In 2018 Nelsons began his simultaneous appointment with the Leipzig Gewandhaus, subsequently recording all the Bruckner symphonies with the GHO. Along the way he did all the Beethovens on DG with Vienna. The multiple relationships make Nelsons among the busiest of conductors (probably among the busiest of humans). The confluence between the BSO Nelsons, the Leipzig Nelsons, Deutsche Grammophon and the management partners certainly brings sufficient heft to the project.
Nelsons wears his heart on his sleeve, at least in front of audiences and in English. Discussing one episode or other of Shostakovich’s tumultuous life, Nelsons once said earnestly: “He was trying to be a good communist. We all were.”
DSCH
Such an admission seems stunningly dated now, but it reveals much about what a figure like Shostakovich must have meant to a young musician like Nelsons. The moment of that feeling, its context, has faded, but these disks make sure that feeling keeps its voice.
(Other moments in time: in a 2017 review, referring to Nelsons and then-wife Kristine Opolais, I led with “They are the Tom and Gisele of classical music.” Cluelessly prescient.)
The 19-disc set will cost you around 100 bucks, but you shouldn’t be asking. If you want recordings of all the Shostakovich large-scale music with excellent musicians representing scores of top-flight performances, this is your box set.