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BBC Music Magazine Evening Standard Gramophone Magazine |
CD Review The Independent Chamber symphonies by Sviridov and Vainberg on a new album by the Moscow Soloists, though more conventional, also harbour their fair share of surprises. Vainberg's piece opens mildly enough, a little like Joseph Suk's Serenade, but soon reveals a tougher heart, the Baroque overtones of the second movement, which opens with gently plucked lower strings and a melody slowly building above them, generates considerable intensity. The high-point of the programme, which is expertly directed by the violist Yuri Bashmet, is an urgent performance of the Chamber symphony that Rudolf Barshai fashioned from Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet. You won't find many quartet recordings that hammer out the fourth movement's imitated gunfire as forcefully as Bashmet's Muscovites do on this well-engineered recording. |