GRAMOPHONE
London

SHOSTAKOVICH Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a. Symphony for Strings in A flat, Op. 118a. (arr. Rudolf Barschai). String Quartet No. 15, in E flat minor, Op. 144 (arr. Misha Rachlevsky). (CLAVES CD 50-9115 )

Time to eat a few words; or at least to qualify them. There has been growing disquiet among reviewers, myself included, over the continuing flow of Shostakovich quartets scored up for full string band or sometimes larger forces. The problem is, as I see it, that such arrangements tend to lose more in focus than they gain in richness and power. But experience should have warned us that there is no legislating for inspired performance. The Kremlin Chamber Orchestra, formed only in September 1991, certainly sounds inspired here and you could easily believe that the music had been conceived for this medium. Indeed, there are plenty of recordings of these works as quartets which leave far less of an impression.

What Misha Rachlevsky and his hand-picked players manage to convey, far more than rival recordings such as Barshai's (DG) or Ashkenazy's (Decca), is the sense of how much the music has had to overcome in order to come into being in the first place. Tone-quality and inflexion are the key. I can't remember when I last heard such sparing use of vibrato from a string orchestra or such understated yet perceptive phrasing. Slow and moderately paced movements are given a forward-looking momentum which borders on the prosaic-all three works end just a touch matter-of-factly-but which more importantly purges the music of confessional angst and substitutes inner resistance. Fast movements are by no means headlong in tempo, but their inexorable drive makes them hair-raisingly intense; here is that feeling of the music beating inside your head which marks out the finest Shostakovich performances.

Rachlevsky has done a marvelous job on the Fifteenth Quartet. He takes the first movement "Elegy" faster than marked, but succeeds better than most in suggesting sorrow drained to the bitterest dregs. Not for nothing does he suggest subtitling the piece Requiem-a terrifying beating of wings comes across in the "Epilogue". The arrangement itself is unfussy (as are Barshai's of the other two quartets), one of the very few major adjustments being the tremolando Rachlevsky adds to the violin and cello accompaniment. This lends the fourth movement "Nocturne" a shiver of anxiety-yet another touch of inspiration in an excellently recorded disc which deserves every success.

D.J.F.