» Part 2
By Nestor CASTIGLIONE

Shostakovich: The Gadfly (complete original score), Suite from The Counterplan (Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz/Mark Fitz-Gerald) [Naxos] – Another Shostakovich score makes a favorite pick of the year. This time it’s the world premiere recording of the complete original score to the 1957 Soviet film, “The Gadfly.” The suite compiled by the composer’s friend Levon Atovmyan is a well-known staple of recordings, but this Naxos disc marks the first time the original score in its entirety has been recorded. (An extensive selection from this version was recorded in 1997 by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly.) The recording then is a revelation, sometimes to the benefit of the composer, at other times highlighting positively the extensive work that Atovmyan did in preparing (and sometimes improving) the work for the concert stage. Atovmyan not only brightened the orchestration (albeit using a smaller orchestra), but transposed a number of cues, and even composed long stretches of linking passages outright. The original score, while still carrying the Italianate color of the more famous suite, is altogether a more sober affair, more in line stylistically with Shostakovich’s contemporaneous “Symphony No. 11” and “Piano Concerto No. 2.” While his “serious” work such as his operas, symphonies, and chamber music earn more acclaim, it might very well be in his film scores that Shostakovich evinced some of his greatest moments of invention. Mark Fitz-Gerald, who has reconstructed and prepared a number of the composer’s unpublished and incomplete scores, is a compelling advocate who has a fine German orchestra at the ready. Extensive and detailed liner notes, not to mention the modest asking price make this impossible to resist.

Karl Böhm: The Early Years 1935 – 1949 [Warner] – Another in the long line of inexpensive boxsets offered by Warner Classics (formerly EMI) in its “Icon” series is this veritable treasure trove of early recordings by Austrian maestro, Karl Böhm, consisting mostly of his prewar discography with the Staatskapelle Dresden, and complemented by an assortment of his immediate postwar work with the Vienna Philharmonic. The burnished bronze of the Dresden orchestra is no doubt one of the main reasons to get this set. But no less important is the musicianship and direction Böhm displays, who cuts a more vigorous figure here than his later sober reputation would imply. His Bruckner recordings remain among the finest ever made, outdated sound and all. But the jewel here is the recording of Act III from Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” with the combined forces of the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Semperoper Dresden. A dream cast (including the ringing yet pliant tenor of Torsten Ralf as Walther von Stolzing, as well as the avuncular warmth of Hans Hermann Nissen as Hans Sachs), superb choral work and a sense of occasion and excitement missing from nearly all other readings of this opera, Böhm here proved, as if any further testimony were needed, why he will be continued to be remembered as one of the greats of conducting.

The Maryla Jonas Story [Sony] – Perhaps the biggest surprise in this year’s bumper crop of reissues was Sony’s box devoted to the complete recordings of Maryla Jonas, a Polish pianist who enjoyed a brief streak of fame before illness and untimely death relegated her to obscurity. A previous CD reissue by Pearl offering a sampling of her work quickly went out-of-print, fetching exorbitantly high prices on the second-hand market. This set, remastered from the original tapes and metal parts by Sony, is altogether better, offering not only her complete (if lamentably small) discography, but presenting them in reproductions of the original album jackets, with fine liner notes by Jed Distler, and at a very reasonable price to boot. Jonas’ art is wholly removed from today’s pianism, with its post-Horowitzian/post-Argerichian obsession with speed, power and willfulness. Her touch could be feathery soft, her sense of control taut yet supple. Yet everything breathes naturally, with a finely honed sense of rubati that (especially in her collection of Chopin’s “Mazurkas”) lend the music a quality of being improvised on the spot. The fact that health didn’t permit her to record more is a tragedy indeed. One can only imagine wonders she could have shared had time allowed her to explore Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, et al. There is a humanity to her playing that looks back to the 19th, rather than forward into the 20th century – a valuable keepsake of a time when music-making had yet to become the ossified and marketed commodity it has since become.

  Nestor CASTIGLIONE