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EAN: 0077774995528 Label: Angel Records Manufacturer: Angel Records Number Of Discs: 2 Publisher: Angel Records Release Date: May 08, 1990 Studio: Angel Records Editorial Review: Amazon.com essential recording: Written between 1930 and 1932, The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was one of the most brilliant achievements of Shostakovich's long career. It was also the work that got him into trouble with Stalin. When the Soviet leader attended a performance in Moscow in 1936, almost two years after the opera's acclaimed Leningrad premiere, he personally ordered the publication of a scathing article in Pravda ("Muddle Instead of Music"), unleashing a ruthless campaign to reduce the arts in Soviet Russia to a state of dogmatic subservience to the regime. Lady Macbeth would disappear from the repertory for 30 years, and Shostakovich, despite his great gifts for opera, would focus his attention on symphonic and chamber music instead. But what an opera this one was! Notwithstanding its title, it has nothing to do with Shakespeare's Macbeth and quite a lot to do with Dostoevsky (even though it's based on a story by another 19th-century writer, Nikolai Laskov). The plot has all the elements of a Russian epic--boredom, need, irresistible sexual longing, infidelity, murder, suicide--and the music is vintage Shostakovich, swinging between farce and tragedy with astonishing sureness, magnificently intense, deeply absorbing, yet approachable. The opera's climactic scenes are driven by music of incredible power, and there are pages of haunting lyric beauty as well, such as Katarina's aria in scene 3, or the extraordinary music that begins the love scene between Katarina and Sergey--mysterious, edgy, sensuous, and vast. It's all brought home on this recording, a labor of love from two of the composer's closest friends and greatest champions. Vishnevskaya, the great exponent of the role of Katarina, sings with untrammeled splendor, while Rostropovich, the supreme interpreter of the music of Shostakovich in our time, conducts a characterful, white-hot performance by the London Philharmonic. --Ted Libbey Average Rating:
 Rating: - An unbelievable experience !I would pick on all the superlatives thrown in by the other reviewers, all 6 of whom have given it a 5-star rating, and say it is also of my experience. I have sat with this CD every evening for the past 6 days (since getting it) still unable to absorb the rapturous beauty of the music of this great recording, one of the best of my more-than-100 operas on disk and tape. My contribution to the newcomer to this music would be to see a DVD of the opera - there is indeed a disk with the ... Read More Rating: - REMASTERED VERSION NOW AVAILABLEEMI has remastered this enduring classic on its "Great Recordings of the Century" line, and it is available. Here's the ID number for finding it on Amazon, or just do a search for Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: B000063UM3 Rating: - What an opera! What power!!As a relative newcomer to classical music I knew very little about Dmitri Shostakvich beyond his name, and even less about opera as such, when I learned about 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk' and determined that I had to have this recording of it, along with recordings of his Symphony No. 10 and his Symphony No. 5, at least. Of these I have von Karajan's and Jârvi's respectively. The former symphony was composed in the summer and fall of 1953, the year of Stalin's death, whose death on March 5, 1953, must ... Read More Rating: - A Magisterial Performance of a Masterpiece!Without a doubt, this is one of the greatest opera recordings of the twentieth century! The opera itself, here restored to its original form -after metamorphosing into 'Katerina Izmailova', the original libretto (and score) hidden from the world for thirty years- is one of the masterful achievments of Shostakovich's life. Rostropovich has assured himself a high place in the pantheon of artists who have rendered incontestable service to mankind by this recording. Katerina's aria which opens the ... Read More Rating: - Right next to Pelleas and WozzeckThese three great operas form the pinnacle of acheivement on the musical stage in the 20th Century. In a word- this music is astonishing. The reocrding- amazing. The conducting- inspired. Probably it is Rostropovich's supreme accomplishment on record. Even the London Philharmonic Orchestra is full of life, vibrant, with horns blasting and strings digging into the music with the Mahler-like intesity found in their recordings with Tennstedt. Gedda moreover, displays the incredible range of ... Read More |
