Canter Bridge

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Lovers of Dmitri Shostakovich’s music are likely to experience the first blush of passion through the eyes rather than the ears. The distinctive cover art of the EMI Classics series juxtaposes the EMI angelic theme to Kazimir Malevich’s Supremus No. 58: Dynamic Composition in Yellow and Black, then gives the mentioned artwork pride of place on the inside of the cd cover itself.

The musical and the visual art complement each other perfectly. And that’s before you’ve turned on your stereo. It gets better after that.

Latvian conductor Mariss Janson makes the Berlin Philharmonic and the London Philharmonic sound like all-Shostakovich shops, with pianist Mikhail Rudy and trumpeter Ole Edvard Antonsen completing the line-up in the composer’s unlikely Concerto for Piano, Trumpet & Strings.

This is not an album to be utilized as mood music, except in those cases where schizophrenic preferences are already too advanced for treatment. Rather, Shostakovich here—as elsewhere—demands the listener’s concentration. When that is conceded to him, he surprises with some gorgeous melodic lines that are almost startling for a man whose output is so easily categorized as spare, atonal, abstract, and even strident.

One catches first wind of such melodic capacity in the second movement of the First Concerto (‘Lento’), then is almost overtaken by it in the Andante of the Concerto No. 2.

Still, it is misguided to seek only those melodic passages that most appeal to one’s aesthetic palate, so I must mention that Shostakovich’s pathos and power reside also in those tranches of challenging dissonance that are for many an acquired taste. Though the composer might not agree with the urge to write his story across the historical canvas or to see them principally againt that backdrop, one can almost hear the events of early twentieth-century Russia in these pieces, as Mother Russia writhed.

All in all, some brilliant Shostakovitch being played here. It’s even affordable. Kudos to EMI for the artwork.