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.
