There's a theory among lovers of Russian music that the conductors who worked directly with Dmitry Shostakovich have a leg up in interpreting his music. Whether or not it's true, Marin Alsop, who was a protégée of Leonard Bernstein, is a fine interpreter of his music, and here she delivers an excellent collection of his choral music headlined by the difficult Symphony No. 3 ("Kaddish"), given in its original 1963 version. A 1977 revision shortened the work, but Alsop takes the sprawling quality of Bernstein's music at face ...
Read More
There's a theory among lovers of Russian music that the conductors who worked directly with Dmitry Shostakovich have a leg up in interpreting his music. Whether or not it's true, Marin Alsop, who was a protégée of Leonard Bernstein, is a fine interpreter of his music, and here she delivers an excellent collection of his choral music headlined by the difficult Symphony No. 3 ("Kaddish"), given in its original 1963 version. A 1977 revision shortened the work, but Alsop takes the sprawling quality of Bernstein's music at face value and holds it all together (she is also very sympathetic to the similarly musically and textually multilingual Mass of 1971). This is not a symphony in a conventional sense, but a sort of narrated Jewish oratorio, with a text fusing the Kaddish prayer and a text of Bernstein's own composition. Alsop is immeasurably aided here by the 82-year-old Claire Bloom as the reader: Bloom, who sounds just as she did in her theatrical heyday, catches the personal quality that comes through...
Read Less