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Music : Styles : Opera & Vocal : Divas : Vishnevskaya, Galina
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The composer's 1963 recording remains, after 35 years, the preferred account, unequaled in its scope and emotional intensity. It brings together the three soloists for whom the work was written, chosen not only because of their artistry but because they represented three of the nations most deeply scarred by World War II--the Soviet Union, England, and Germany. Benjamin Britten holds the vast forces together, and the superbly engineered recording captures with chilling exactitude the power and the nuance of his ardent, visionary interpretation. --Ted Libbey
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Written between 1930 and 1932, The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was one of the most brilliant achievements of Shostakovich's long career. It was also the work that got him into trouble with Stalin. When the Soviet leader attended a performance in Moscow in 1936, almost two years after the opera's acclaimed Leningrad premiere, he personally ordered the publication of a scathing article in Pravda ("Muddle Instead of Music"), unleashing a ruthless campaign to reduce the arts in Soviet Russia to a state of dogmatic subservience to the regime. Lady Macbeth would disappear from the repertory for 30 years, and Shostakovich, despite his great gifts for opera, would focus his attention on symphonic and chamber music instead. But what an opera this one was! Notwithstanding its title, it has nothing to do with Shakespeare's Macbeth and quite a lot to do with Dostoevsky (even though it's based on a story by another 19th-century writer, Nikolai Laskov). The plot has all the elements of a Russian epic--boredom, need, irresistible sexual longing, infidelity, murder, suicide--and the music is vintage Shostakovich, swinging between farce and tragedy with astonishing sureness, magnificently intense, deeply absorbing, yet approachable. The opera's climactic scenes are driven by music of incredible power, and there are pages of haunting lyric beauty as well, such as Katarina's aria in scene 3, or the extraordinary music that begins the love scene between Katarina and Sergey--mysterious, edgy, sensuous, and vast. It's all brought home on this recording, a labor of love from two of the composer's closest friends and greatest champions. Vishnevskaya, the great exponent of the role of Katarina, sings with untrammeled splendor, while Rostropovich, the supreme interpreter of the music of Shostakovich in our time, conducts a characterful, white-hot performance by the London Philharmonic. --Ted Libbey
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If you are going to have a copy of Rimsky-Korsakov's revision of Mussorgsky's Boris, this is probably the one to have, though there is also a lot to be said for Boris Christoff's tour de force in which he sings the opera's three big bass roles. Nicolai Ghiaurov and Galina Vishnevskaya are younger and vocally fresher than in their later recordings of the same roles, and Herbert von Karajan's conducting has (like so much of his work) a high-gloss polish that would be less appropriate for Mussorgsky's rough-hewn text than it is for Rimsky-Korsakov's smoother work. --Joe McLellan
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Shostakovich's orchestrations for Mussorgsky's Songs & Dances of Death heightens the music's stark, desolate qualities, without shying away from ear-catching instrumental combinations. Galina Vishnevskaya's raw-nerve response to the texts and affinity for the composer's sound world border on the clairvoyant. Her husband is a better accompanist at the piano than on the podium, providing firm support in Shostakovich's Satires and Prokofiev's Five Poems by Anna Akhmatova. The world premier of Shostakovich's Seven Romances to Poems by Alexander Blok finds Mstislav Rostropovich at the cello where he belongs, playing as gorgeously as David Oistrakh. The violinist and the soprano, though, are not quite attuned to each other during their duet. An absorbing occasion, nonetheless, and kudos to Melodya for making these performances available for the first time. --Jed Distler
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