Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare, music director of the Orchester symphonique de Montréal (OSM), will release the first recording of his career as a conductor on Friday, May 6: a Symphony noh 11 by Shostakovich, captured in concert with his orchestra in San Diego, California.
Recorded just before the pandemic, on February 20 and 21, 2020 at the Copley Symphony Hall in San Diego, the 11and by Shostakovich, “Year 1905”, is published by Platoon, of which it is more or less the first classic release. It is not a CD since the physical medium has become anecdotal in the United States. The recording will only be available for download and on-demand listening from Friday.
The choice of the work exposes Rafael Payare and his orchestra to high-flying comparisons. With the Russian versions on the one hand (Kondrachine, Rozhdestvenski), a major trio of recordings by Russian conductors made in the West (Barchaï, Lazarev, Kitajenko) and at least three fascinating re-readings (Berglund, Haitink, Wigglesworth).
The Symphony of Oppression
The 11and Symphony was composed in 1957, when Shostakovich was being rehabilitated by the Soviet authorities. These wanted to commemorate the October Revolution of 1917. Shostakovich instead chose the suppression of the 1905 uprising, when the imperial army on Red Sunday fired on demonstrators in Saint Petersburg and left hundreds dead. The town councilors obviously found nothing wrong with it, whereas for Shostakovich, the implicit parallel with the Soviet repression in Hungary in 1956 was too tempting. But barely cleared of suspicion, the composer got back into a delicate position…
The Eleventh was treated as a rather minor and descriptive symphony until the 1980s. But here too there was a perestroika. Musical this time. The two aesthetic visions still coexist: a descriptive (initial) epic vision and a vision that makes the weight of the drama “inside” heard and felt, with much slower tempos (the 1er movement that portrays the situation can go from 13 to 18 minutes!). Paavo Berglund in 1980, Guennadi Rojdestvenski in 1983 and Bernard Haitink in 1983 are the pioneers of this new reading that conductors like Neeme Järvi or Vasily Petrenko did not follow and that Mark Wigglesworth dug into.
It is this reasoned dramatic path that Rafael Payare takes with a dense and concentrated interpretation, in “In Memoriam” (3and movement) very grieving, while others (Lazarev, Rojdestvenski) detect in it the ferment of hope. In the Finale, Payare is more aggressive than Haitink. The success of the conductor and his excellent orchestra (brass, woodwinds, percussion!) is amplified by an excellent sound recording by Douglas R. Dillon, not “slamming” on the percussion (snare drum), but effective and well staged, which will definitely be able to compete for the Grammy next year.
Does this Platoon release tell us something about the future Payare-OSM? Platoon, a non-existent classical entity, is a company created in 2016 that offers recording, marketing and distribution services to artists. It was the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, and not Rafael Payare, who did business with this company, now owned by Apple. Moreover, it would be very surprising to see the OSM give up the physical medium. The thing is to follow, but this first step of our new leader in the world of recording is relevant and encouraging.