Jesús López-Cobos - Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 15 (2001)

Now in his 15th and final season as Music Director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Jesus Lopez-Cobos has served the second longest tenure of any music director in the CSO’s history. Lopez-Cobos joined the orchestra in 1986. At the end of his tenure, he will have conducted 564 concerts, made 26 recordings with the orchestra (more than any previous music director), conducted the first nationally telecast performance, and taken the CSO to thirteen states and eight countries. In addition, Lopez-Cobos will receive the Medalla de Oro de las Bellas Artes (Gold Medal of the Fine Arts) from the government of Spain, and he was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture.

For his penultimate recording with the CSO on Telarc, Lopez-Cobos leads the orchestra in “bookend” performances of the first and last symphonies by Shostakovich. Born in 1906, Dmitrti Shostakovich lived for all but the first eleven years of his life under the communist system of the former Soviet Union. In his early years as a composer, the Soviet government kept a wary eye on the meanings of works produced by Russian artists and some of Shostakovich’s works came to be understood as musical statements of Soviet nationalism and optimism—a supposition that has inspired considerable debate. Late in life, however, with Cold War tensions failing, Shostakovich turned away from political to personal meanings.

These two symphonies display this evolution in the composer’s style. The First was composed as a graduation piece and was finished before he turned 19. It shot the young composer to immediate world attention; within two years of its premiere in 1926 the symphony had been performed across the Soviet Union, introduced in Germany by Walter, and in America by Stokowski and Rodzinski. It is dedicated to fellow student Mikhail Kvadri, who later became the first of Shostakovich’s friends to die in Stalin’s purges.

The Fifteenth Symphony is one of the composer’s most internal and enigmatic works, and is notable for its quotations from other sources, including the overture to Rossini’s opera William Tell and Wagner’s Ring cycle. Composed in just two months in the summer of 1971, it was premiered in Moscow in January of 1972. Full orchestra is used sparingly, with much of the music given to solo instruments or small ensembles within the orchestra.

Upcoming on Telarc will be Maestro Lopez-Cobos’s final recording as Music Director with the CSO, in a program devoted to his Spanish heritage featuring works by Debussy (Iberia) and Turina.