Shostakovich: Symphony No. 13 (2020)

Riccardo Muti has shown such vigor over his tenure with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that it's easy to forget how long his career has been. In 1970, in Rome, he conducted the Symphony No. 13 in B flat minor, Op. 113, of Shostakovich; the work, which almost landed the composer in hot water once again in the Soviet Union, had only recently been smuggled out to the West and was far from a common item. So Muti has long experience with this searing work and its gravity. He comes in at about a minute shorter per movement than ... Read More

Riccardo Muti has shown such vigor over his tenure with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that it's easy to forget how long his career has been. In 1970, in Rome, he conducted the Symphony No. 13 in B flat minor, Op. 113, of Shostakovich; the work, which almost landed the composer in hot water once again in the Soviet Union, had only recently been smuggled out to the West and was far from a common item. So Muti has long experience with this searing work and its gravity. He comes in at about a minute shorter per movement than Maxim Shostakovich and the Prague Symphony Orchestra, whose tempi presumably reflected the composer's wishes, but it's all to the good. In this live CSO recording, Muti has room for the truly tragic quality of the first movement, with the Yevgeny Yevtushenko text about the Babi Yar massacre and the absence of any memorial on the site 20 years later in the Soviet Union, but what's remarkable about this choral symphony is that the first movement is just the beginning of Yevtushenko and... Read Less