Shostakovich's grim Symphony No. 14, Op. 135, a work that Keats might have called half in love with easeful death, has experienced a surge of interest in the early 21st century, with major new readings by conductors and orchestras in both eastern and western Europe. Perhaps this one, with Serbian conductor Gordan Nikolic leading the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, combines the best of both worlds. It is a deliberate, detailed rendering that clocks in at seven or eight minutes longer than Vladmir Jurowski's contemporary live ...
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Shostakovich's grim Symphony No. 14, Op. 135, a work that Keats might have called half in love with easeful death, has experienced a surge of interest in the early 21st century, with major new readings by conductors and orchestras in both eastern and western Europe. Perhaps this one, with Serbian conductor Gordan Nikolic leading the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, combines the best of both worlds. It is a deliberate, detailed rendering that clocks in at seven or eight minutes longer than Vladmir Jurowski's contemporary live version with the London Symphony Orchestra, or Gennady Rozhdestvensky's slashing classic reading with the State Symphony of the USSR in the 1960s. The effect is twofold: it especially challenges the small orchestra of strings and percussion, challenges to which Nikolic and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra respond in an exemplary way. The percussion-heavy transitional passages between the 11 orchestral songs, transitions that make the work into a symphony rather than a song cycle,...
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