# The Definitive Babi Yar



## tahnak

`Babi Yar' is Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13 in B Flat Minor. It was completed in 1962 with a text setting by the rebel poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. This work is about probably one of the worst mass executions in the history of the modern world. In just a matter of couple of days in September 1941, the invading Nazi army executed close to thirty five thousand Jews at Ukraine in a place called Babi Yar. By the end of the Second World War, the number of victims in the place had reached an appalling figure close to one hundred thousand.

This musical expression of Dmitri Shostakovich broke the long and officially suppressed silence on these tragic events.

Bernard Haitink has given a superb rendition of this symphony with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. I hail this performance as the definitive reading of this symphony.


----------



## ptr

I find Haitink perfectly unidiomatic! Not on my top ten of Thirtheenth's... 

I don't think that anyone can remotely compete with the sheer electricity of Kirill Kondrashin conducting the second performance with His Moscow Philharmonic, the basses of the Republican State and Gnessin Institute Choirs and the magnificent but nervous Vitaly Grodmadsky as soloist! (Released by Russian Disc, OOP at the moment?) Marius Rintzler sound like a wimp in comparison! Kondrashin's later "studio" recording with Arthur Eisen is also bleek in comparison!

The urban legend has it that the man who was in the recording control room was either to nervous about how the symphony would be revived by the Soviet Authorities or that he just liked the music so much that he forgot because he was mesmerized by the moment, who knows?
The second urban legend entailing Decca, Shostakovich, Kondrashin and Haitink, says that Decca had contracted Kondrashin to record a complete Shostakovich Symphony Cycle for the label with the ConcertgebouwOrkest (he was the RCO Permanent Guest Conductor) but the plans where cut short by his early death for a heart attack in 1981. Hence the job was passed on to Haitink who it's said accepted reluctantly.

/ptr


----------



## Sid James

Shostakovich's Symphony #13 is indeed a great work. I've got the Solti recording now out on Decca Eloquence, and in the notes, Solti calls it a masterpiece. I agree with that assessment of this work. I have heard Haitink's account but not within recent memory to comment on it right now. But I see it less a case of a definitive performance, I'm more interested in the work itself. In any case, the Solti interp has Anthony Hopkins reading English translations of the poems before each movement is played. He reads them with eloquence and also emotion, he really adds to the performance.

But I just want to reflect on this piece of music itself, and the history it tries to convey.

Basically, that psychopathic quality of the piece, and the feeling of being sucked into something you don't have control over, sadly mirrors the events of the Babi Yar execution and related aktionen in occupied Ukraine and Belorus during the war. In all, my memory of it is that records are that 150,000 where killed in the massacre and other massacres and aktionen in the region. There's many tragedies here. One of them is that most of the Soviet Union's Jewish community where concentrated in that area, so after the war not many where left. For example in the Kiev area during 1942, a year after the German occuptation of Ukraine, only about 20 Jews where counted as being left there, alive. I'd guess that by the end of the war, there where even less than that who survived. It was horrible.

The symphony was written during the Khrushchev era, when censorship was relaxed a bit. Stalin was just as much an anti Semite as Hitler was. In fact, just before his death he was planning another Holocaust. The Jewish doctor's case (a racist show trial) is proof of this, as well as things like Prokofiev's Jewish wife being sent to the gulags. Khrushchev was eager to separate himself from Stalinism, to de-Stalinise the country. So it was kind of opportunistic of Yevutschenko to write the poems, and of course Shostakovich obviously seeing the Russian people's struggle against Stalin as being the same as the Jews strugging against Nazi oppression, its almost as if the poetry was made for him to write music to.

However, the premiere almost didn't happen. Shostakovich approached a couple of conductors and they turned him down. It was too much of a hot potato. Yevgeny Mavrinsky said he couldn't handle choral music (just an excuse, most likely, he was afraid to do it), but Kondrashin accepted. No wonder, once the more conservative Brezhnev regime came to power, Konrashin ended up voting with his feet and leaving the USSR. The other thing is that there was a phone call, allegedly by a high party official, before the premiere wanting Kondrashin to call the whole thing off. But he persisted and it was performed.

This was the most controversial of all Shostakovich's works. It resonated strongly with the audience. There was an electricity in the air by all accounts, and the applause was huge. However, after a few performances, the work was shelved. It was rarely if ever performed during the rest of the Soviet era. The ousting of the more liberal Khrushchev and his replacement by Brezhnev, who turned the clock back on even these more mild reforms, didn't help one bit.

I think people very easily forget how hard it was, how hard censorship was of Soviet composers like Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and even the more comparatively conservative Myaskovsky and even Khatchaturian, who was of all things a devout Communist! But he wasn't by anything I know a Stalinist, and that was the problem. There was a power struggle going on between 'hard core' Communists (eg. Stalinists) and more moderate reformist ones like Khrushchev (whose real successor was Gorbachev, but it was too late, by the time Gorby took charge, the USSR was in its death throes).

My point is that the first poem in the symphony begins "There is no monument at the Babi Yar." Well, thanks to this great piece of music - or at least its part in bringing this tragic piece of history out of the closet - today there does stand a monument there. & thats what music like this does, tells stories of our own time, exposes them, and holds up a light to them, a light of humanity and some sort of hope that it will never happen again amidst all the horror which words cannot describe. On my darker days I am not so optimistic, but I think that at least this piece is there for people to reflect on and truly understand history.


----------



## ptr

Sid James said:


> Shostakovich's Symphony #13 is indeed a great work.


Great summation! Very well written Sid!!

/ptr


----------



## Sid James

ptr said:


> Great summation! Very well written Sid!!
> 
> /ptr


Well I owe it to learning about this history in recent years. The Eastern Front of WWII was just brutal. Not only USSR but also Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland. Even the statistics are chilling. Look at Lidice (which the composer Martinu wrote a piece in memory, the town wiped out as a reprisal for Czech resistance killing a big wig Nazi).

But apart from that, the notes to the Eloquence cd, a double cd set with Solti doing Shostakovich's Babi Yar as well as other things (incl. Mussorgsky) has great notes, all this and more is in it. What a great label Eloquence is, not only the music but how the notes put everything into context.


----------



## Delicious Manager

ptr said:


> The urban legend has it that the man who was in the recording control room was either to nervous about how the symphony would be revived by the Soviet Authorities or that he just liked the music so much that he forgot because he was mesmerized by the moment, who knows?
> The second urban legend entailing Decca, Shostakovich, Kondrashin and Haitink, says that Decca had contracted Kondrashin to record a complete Shostakovich Symphony Cycle for the label with the ConcertgebouwOrkest (he was the RCO Permanent Guest Conductor) but the plans where cut short by his early death for a heart attack in 1981. Hence the job was passed on to Haitink who it's said accepted reluctantly.
> /ptr


I discovered this underrated masterpiece through the first recording made of it outside of the Soviet Union - that by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra with the Finnish baritone Tom Krause as the soloist. It was fine, if somewhat understated. As has already been stated, it is a minor miracle that this symphony was performed at all and was largely down to the courage and conviction of the great conductor Kirill Kondrashin who had also stuck his neck out the previous year (1961) by conducting the first performance of Shostakovich's long-withheld Fourth Symphony. Kondrashin lost his original intended soloist (the Ukrainian Boris Grymya), who, unlike Kondrashin, was persuaded to withdraw from the premiere performance and had to replace him at short notice with Vitaly Gromadsky.

There are live recordings of the two first performances in December 1962 and the tension and frisson are almost tangible. The recording quality isn't bad, but these are historical documents and, as such, indispensable. Kondrashin's 1967 studio recording has far better sound quality (albeit with some distortion during dynamic peaks) and is, for me, the most successful of all recordings (despite this recording using the 'revised' tamed-down Yevtushenko verses during the first movement).

Kondrashin also made a recording for Philips in December 1980 (after his defection from the USSR) with John Shirley-Quirk and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir. This was another orchestra of which Kondrashin was to have become principal conductor in 1981 (along with the Concertgebouw Orchestra), only to have been denied due to his untimely death one day after his 67th birthday in March 1981. I think THIS recording was the first of a projected complete series for Philips, rather than the one with the Concertgebouw Orchestra suggested above by ptr.


----------



## apricissimus

My personal favorite is the Masur/New York Philharmonic recording on Teldec, due in no small part to the singing of Sergei Leiferkus.

Edited to add: Here's the second movement of this recording that someone uploaded to Youtube:


----------



## Vaneyes

Different strokes. A conceded great work (I don't think it's underrated), but I can't imagine anyone wanting to sit through this more than a couple of times.


----------



## Tristan

The "Babi Yar" was the first Shostakovich symphony I saw in concert. Haitink's is also my favorite. Interestingly enough, I found out about this symphony by hearing snippets of it in a radio commercial; so when I saw it on the SFS's schedule, I knew I had to see it live


----------



## techniquest

From my p.o.v, purely as a listener rather than an authority on the music or it's background, I really don't think you can beat the Barshai recording with the WDR Sinfonieorchester, the Choral Academy of Moscow and Sergei Aleksashkin (bass). The brass snarl and rasp, the woods - especially the bass clarinet - sound superb and also really shine during the many woodwind unisons in the second movement. The strings have that beautiful etherial quality when necessary such as at the start of the symphony and in the wierd glissandi in the third movement, and the double basses have real depth. As for the percussion, well no other recording can beat the WDR orchestra's monster of a tam-tam! The mens choir sounds beefy and the solo bass Sergei Aleksashkin sounds right for the piece. What I also like about this recording is the balance between orchestra, choir and soloist. Add to all of this that it is available on the budget Regis label and you simply can't go wrong.


----------



## FrMartin

This is just a superb thread. So much love and care and wisdom in it, so well written.

I find Sid James' post particularly pertinent to my own state of engagement with this work: which I have just discovered, actually, via Gergiev's Proms telecast of 2006 (?) with the forces from the Maryinsky. Committed and coming from a place of deep angst, at least ... where do you begin to get your bearings in this steaming lava field of a work; and the Proms audience sustains that special excitement, so reminiscent of Kondrashin's 1962 "second night". A shock to go to either Haitink or Solti from that, with their composed, controlled forces - and superb forces at that, capable of anything. But I am coming to be more and more convicted that there is a depth of grief to Solti that belies the initial impression of classical constraint, however heroic. This is the cry of God: not just of humanity: and the groaning of the cosmos, given voice by the exquisite attention to the cumulative effect of subtly shifting layers of sound, added piece by piece, each one preparing us for what comes next. What a powerhouse the CSO can be: but how well they know every millimeter of the throttle of that mighty machine.


----------



## Heck148

Sid James said:


> Well I owe it to learning about this history in recent years. The Eastern Front of WWII was just brutal. Not only USSR but also Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland. Even the statistics are chilling. Look at Lidice (which the composer Martinu wrote a piece in memory, the town wiped out as a reprisal for Czech resistance killing a big wig Nazi).


Yes, the Eastern Front of WWII Germany v Russia is the biggest single war ever fought, titantic in its bloody barbarity and massive destruction....Some of those bloodbaths surpass even the WWI slaughters like Verdun, and the Somme....total casualties of the Stalingrad campaign are estimated at 1.6 MILLION!!

Many people do not realize the enormity of December 7, 1941 in World history - of course the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is widely known - not so well-known is the fact that on December 5-7, 1941 - the Russians, hard-pressed on the Moscow front, went on the offensive, and hurled the Germans back from the city, after it appeared its fall was all but certain...
Stalin's spy in Japan, Richard Sorge, advised Stalin that the Japanese would attack East, and South - at the United States, and Dutch Indonesia, not westward towards Russia. Gambling that this info was correct Stalin transported some 100+ divisions from the Far East to the Moscow Front - and hurled them at the Germans en masse. The attacks, tho poorly coordinated, were overwhelming by sheer numbers of men and material....the Wehrmacht was thrown back and only thru desperate defense did it prevent complete dissolution. It can be argued that Russia was saved by the attack on Pearl Harbor. In any case, the events are closely connected.
Shostakovich gives us a grim musical picture of the terrible conflict in Russia, a tragedy likely unrivalled in human history.



> a double cd set with Solti doing Shostakovich's Babi Yar as well as other things (incl. Mussorgsky) has great notes, all this and more is in it.


Solti's #13 is excellent.....he was a fine Shostakovich interpreter, tho a latecomer...his #8 is devastating, brutal - heard it live in Boston Symphony Hall. it was cosmic...


----------



## hpowders

I like the Kurt Masur/ NY Philharmonic performance.


----------



## JACE

DSCH's Thirteenth Symphony is a devastating work. I think it's one of his very best compositions.

I wouldn't call any of them "definitive," but I've particularly enjoyed these:
- Kondrashin, Moscow PO
- Rozhdestvensky, USSR Ministry of Culture SO
- Barshai, WDR SO


----------



## Pugg

FrMartin said:


> This is just a superb thread. So much love and care and wisdom in it, so well written.
> 
> I find Sid James' post particularly pertinent to my own state of engagement with this work: which I have just discovered, actually, via Gergiev's Proms telecast of 2006 (?) with the forces from the Maryinsky. Committed and coming from a place of deep angst, at least ... where do you begin to get your bearings in this steaming lava field of a work; and the Proms audience sustains that special excitement, so reminiscent of Kondrashin's 1962 "second night". A shock to go to either Haitink or Solti from that, with their composed, controlled forces - and superb forces at that, capable of anything. But I am coming to be more and more convicted that there is a depth of grief to Solti that belies the initial impression of classical constraint, however heroic. This is the cry of God: not just of humanity: and the groaning of the cosmos, given voice by the exquisite attention to the cumulative effect of subtly shifting layers of sound, added piece by piece, each one preparing us for what comes next. What a powerhouse the CSO can be: but how well they know every millimeter of the throttle of that mighty machine.


Welcome to Talk Calssical.
I go for Haitink!


----------

