The Shostakovich Symphonies, part 2

 It's a big job not to be undertaken lightly and I may not be giving it my best attention on this first wander through. I should be reading the notes rather than Dorothy Parker, Thomas Hardy or anybody else. Shostakovich is rarely suitable as background music.

I'm up to no. 12, though, on this reconnaissance mission and have just been back to revisit 10. The Petersfield Orchestra are playing that at the upcoming festival there and in all conscience, I really ought to make the effort even if I will have been at Portsmouth Cathedral at lunchtime.

10 is from 1953 and follows hard upon the death of Stalin and a self-imposed silence that resulted from further ideological skirmishes between the tryant and the reluctant court composer. It could only be Shostakovich because it's signed through with his D-S-C-H theme. While it is a major factor in his greatness that he can do things on such a scale and while I could come to appreciate these symphonies given time I can't see a time when they'll ever challenge the chamber music and piano music as my preference. They are grand, public, historic and impressive but necessarily not intimate, contemplative or maybe even delicate like the pieces for fewer instruments. More instruments does not make for finer music and some sort of inverse law of diminishing returns sets in.

11 was a good one, too, but this listening project was interrupted by a higher priority, the arrival of the Prokofiev Piano Sonatas. Natalia Trull's 3-disc set is an immaculate package in which the explosive discovery last week, of no. 7, is only one piece that elevates the composer a few places higher on my list and insists on some comparison with the Shos Preludes and Fugues.

It's hard to say how often the Shostakovich symphonies will be returned to after a second run through once I've got to 15 and then perhaps read the detail but the Prokofiev is less likely to be consigned to shelf space on a permanent basis quite so soon.