Veniamin Fleishman; Dmitri Shostakovich - Rothschild's Violin; From Jewish Folk-Poetry (Gennady Rozhdestvensky)

Information

Composer: Veniamin Fleishman; Dmitri Shostakovich

• (01) Fleishman - Rothschild's Violin (comp. & orch. Shostakovich)
• (15) Shostakovich - From Jewish Folk-Poetry, Op. 79a

Sergei Leiferkus, bass (1-14)

Marina Shaguch, soprano

Larissa Diadkova, mezzo-soprano (15-25)

Konstantin Pluzhnikov, tenor

Ilya Levinsky, tenor (1-14)

Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra

Gennady Rozhdestvensky, conductor

Date: 1996

Label: RCA

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Review

This is something of an event for followers of Shostakovich and Soviet music. Venyamin Fleyshman (or, in less scholarly form, Benjamin Fleischmann) was among the most talented of Shostakovich’s first tranche of pupils from the time of the latter’s official rehabilitation in 1937. His opera on Chekhov’s short story was completely composed but only two-thirds orchestrated by June 1941 when he was conscripted, and he apparently died soon afterwards at the battlefront. Shostakovich thought so highly of Rothschild’s Violin that he took the manuscript with him on his evacuation from Leningrad, and in February 1944 he completed the orchestration. Ten days later he began work on his Second Piano Trio, the first of his works to include Jewish themes with their thinly veiled symbolism of solidarity with the oppressed.

The strongest parts of Fleischmann’s score are the interludes and the postlude. These fully bear out his teacher’s faith in him, and parts of them would not be out of place in Shostakovich’s own Lady Macbeth. There are also hints of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, which Shostakovich had been demonstrating to his pupils at the time. But the influence went both ways. Fleischmann’s conclusion finds an echo in the final pages of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, and the latter’s own incomplete wartime opera The Gamblers occasionally comes to mind.

Performances of Rothschild’s Violin have been few and far between. Solomon Volkov, of Testimony notoriety, was involved in putting it on in Leningrad in 1968, and I see that a British premiere is planned for May this year by Mecklenburgh Opera with the LPO. There was a Melodiya LP recording in 1982 which enjoyed wider circulation than many discs from that source.

Rozhdestvensky was the conductor there as here, and differences between his two performances are negligible. For the new issue the Rotterdam Philharmonic are on excellent form, and Leiferkus is in superb voice as the village coffin-maker/violinist nicknamed Bronze, who on his deathbed passes his instrument to his fellow amateur musician and former rival Rothschild. Yet there are more nuances in the role than Leiferkus finds. He does not rise fully to the challenge of Bronze’s long deathbed aria, culminating in the cry “Why can’t people live and let live?”, and the world-weariness of his concluding words is only half-registered.

RCA’s well-balanced recording is a plus, but the main advantage of the new issue is simply that it gives us for the first time the complete libretto (in Cyrillic) and translation. The booklet-essay is short but to the point; curiously it is uncredited. Even more curiously, no synopsis is provided.

The CD is at the same time the soundtrack of a new French film which builds a pseudo-documentary around the opera (for some details see the latest issue of the Shostakovich Society’s house magazine DSCH). The post-history of Rothschild’s Violin includes Shostakovich’s 1949 song-cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry. This work has proved a minefield for commentators. The essay in the booklet rightly reminds us that at the time it was composed it seemed to fulfil all the demands for Shostakovich’s rehabilitation into the Socialist Realist fold. Yet you only have to read some of the texts (“I am happy on my kolkhoz”) and compare them with the musical setting to realize that there is an element of inoskazaniye (‘other-speaking’, i.e. allegory) at work.

This isn’t the place to get into ideological brawls (the fur has been flying over this piece recently in the New York Times and elsewhere). Suffice it to say that this is one of Shostakovich’s most consistently fine song-cycles and that the performance here is first-rate. The three voices are admittedly better individually than as an ensemble; heard together their blend and intonation are not ideal.

The main point is that Rothschild’s Violin is a worthwhile piece in its own right. Shostakovich’s restoration was far more than a tribute to a tragically curtailed talent. It was a phenomenon without which the picture of his own development is seriously incomplete, and its first appearance on CD is a noteworthy event.

-- Gramophone

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Veniamin Fleishman (July 20, 1913, Bezhetsk, Tver Governorate – September 14, 1941, Krasnoye Selo, Leningrad Oblast) was a Soviet composer. While studying under Dmitri Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatory (1939–1941), he began a one-act opera Rothschild's Violin based on Anton Chekhov's short story of the same name. At the outbreak of World War II, Fleishman volunteered for the front and was killed before he could complete the work. In memory of his talented student, Shostakovich rescued the manuscript from besieged Leningrad, finished it and orchestrated it in 1943–1944. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veniamin_Fleishman

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Dmitri Shostakovich (25 September 1906 – 9 August 1975) was a Russian composer, and a prominent figure of 20th-century music. Shostakovich achieved fame in the Soviet Union, but later had a complex and difficult relationship with the government. Shostakovich's music is characterized by sharp contrasts, elements of the grotesque, and ambivalent tonality; the composer was also heavily influenced by the neo-classical style pioneered by Igor Stravinsky, and by the post-Romanticism associated with Gustav Mahler. Shostakovich's works include 15 symphonies, 15 string quartets, and a substantial quantity of film music.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Shostakovich

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Gennady Rozhdestvensky (born 4 May 1931 in Moscow) is a Russian conductor. He studied conducting with his father, noted conductor and pedagogue Nikolai Anosov, at the Moscow Conservatory and piano with Lev Oborin. Rozhdestvensky is considered a versatile conductor and a highly cultured musician with a supple stick technique. With the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra he recorded all the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich, Alexander Glazunov, Anton Bruckner, Alfred Schnittke, and Arthur Honegger for the label Melodiya. He also premiered many works of other Soviet composers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Rozhdestvensky

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