Yo-Yo Ma: Shostakovich review — the superstar cellist holds back too much
It will soon be 11 years since Andris Nelsons became the Boston Symphony Orchestra's music director. His current contract includes an 'evergreen clause' allowing for automatic renewal. Throughout, he's conducted and recorded much Shostakovich, in performances varying between the probably evergreen and the disappointingly deciduous. This new release, recorded live in 2023, teams Nelsons with the superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma in the cello concertos, worried creations from the late 1950s and 60s. Evergreen interpretations? Deciduous? Frustratingly, they're both.Positive aspects, notable from No 1's opening thrusts, include the powerful and subtly inflected tone of Ma's cello. Nelsons's orchestra is just as impressive, whether it's the shrieking winds in No 1 or the horn fanfares and ghostly whisperings of No 2. Interplay between soloist and orchestra
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
05-05-2025
- Times
Yo-Yo Ma: Shostakovich review — the superstar cellist holds back too much
It will soon be 11 years since Andris Nelsons became the Boston Symphony Orchestra's music director. His current contract includes an 'evergreen clause' allowing for automatic renewal. Throughout, he's conducted and recorded much Shostakovich, in performances varying between the probably evergreen and the disappointingly deciduous. This new release, recorded live in 2023, teams Nelsons with the superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma in the cello concertos, worried creations from the late 1950s and 60s. Evergreen interpretations? Deciduous? Frustratingly, they're aspects, notable from No 1's opening thrusts, include the powerful and subtly inflected tone of Ma's cello. Nelsons's orchestra is just as impressive, whether it's the shrieking winds in No 1 or the horn fanfares and ghostly whisperings of No 2. Interplay between soloist and orchestra
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- The Guardian
Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk album review
Performing Shostakovich has been one of Andris Nelsons' calling cards during his first decade as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. What began as a project to survey all of the symphonies, with recordings of them subsequently released by Deutsche Grammophon, was extended to include all the concertos, and ended in spectacular fashion in January last year with concert performances of Shostakovich's most ambitious and controversial stage work, the 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Surprisingly for a work of such notoriety and historical significance, this is just the fourth recording of Lady Macbeth (there's also one available version of Katerina Izmailova, the revision of the score that Shostakovich produced in 1962 in an attempt to rehabilitate it with the Soviet authorities after its official condemnation in 1936). But unfortunately this new version, taken from one of the Boston performances, does not seriously challenge the existing choices. Oddly, each of the three previous commercial recordings, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, Myung-whun Chung and Ingo Metzmacher respectively, all take exactly the same time over the complete opera: 155 minutes. Here, Nelsons takes a whole 20 minutes longer. Though few passages seem to drag unduly, the difference in timings does confirm a lassitude in his performance; despite some of the individual contributions, there's a flatness to the proceedings, a lack of urgency, that undermines their dramatic impact. And, even though there's no shortage of loud, brash playing, Nelsons and the BSO tend to neuter a score that includes some of Shostakovich's most savagely ironic and parodic invention, a radical extreme from which he was forced to retreat. Hearing this account of the score, it's sometimes hard to understand why it should have offended Stalin so much. And while Kristine Opolais has her moments in the title role, her characterisation of Katerina is rather one-dimensional, doing a good line in the character's self-pity but little else. Brendan Gunnell is plausible enough as her lover Sergey, Peter Hoare suitably complaisant as her husband, Zinovy, with Günther Groissböck completing the menage à quatre as her bullying father-in-law Boris. All in all it's a disappointing ending to the Boston Shostakovich series. This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
The Guardian
05-02-2025
- The Guardian
Take That and Jeff Goldblum to perform at Bafta awards
Take That will perform the single Greatest Day at the Bafta film awards later this month, while the actor Jeff Goldblum will play piano during the in memoriam section. The British boyband will be singing their 2008 No 1 during the ceremony because it features prominently in the opening of Sean Baker's sex worker drama Anora, which is up for seven awards including best picture, director and leading actress for Mikey Madison. The band currently comprises Gary Barlow, Howard Donald and Mark Owen. Better Man – a biopic of Robbie Williams, who left the band in 1995, featuring a version of the singer as a chimp – is nominated for best visual effects. Meanwhile, Goldblum, who heads up a jazz band as well as starring in films such as Wicked – which is also in contention for seven awards – will perform on the piano as leading lights from the industry who have died over the past year are remembered. Since Bafta's long-running collaboration with Cirque du Soleil, who traditionally opened the show, came to a close in 2020, the ceremony has included a number of memorable musical numbers. In 2023, Ariana DeBose performed a rap about that year's female nominees, which attracted scorn, mirth and bafflement but has since gone down as a winningly offbeat moment in Bafta history. DeBose defended her performance, saying: 'These lyrics were never meant to be Charles Dickens. They are what they are. On TikTok people were asking about why [one lyric was] 'Blanchett, Cate?' It's literally a play on Madonna's Vogue rap.' This year's Baftas will take place on 16 February in a ceremony overseen by returning host David Tennant. Papal thriller Conclave leads the pack with 12 nominations, followed by Emilia Pérez with 11 and The Brutalist with nine.
