Piano Concerto No.1
1. Maestoso con moto		8:28
2. Scherzo-toccata. Molto vivo		2:55
3. Passacaglia. Sostenuto	5:33
4. Finale. Presto festoso	6:05

Piano Concerto No.3
5. Variations and Theme		21:34

Rodion Shchedrin – piano
USSR Academic Symphony Orchestra
Yevgeny Svetlanov – conductor

Such a potpourri of styles! Rodion Shchedrin's Piano Concerto #1 (1954) is a playful work, composed when he was twenty-two. It shows. Indeed, the piece wears preciousness over its shoulder like a maroon sash. Its bouncy final movement (Presto festoso), with its repetitive melodies and sweeping tutti, resembles the first movement of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto #1. Even though Shchedrin revised it twenty years later, he didn't modernize it. This concerto could be a pastiche concerto from the late Romantic era. Yet Shchedrin plays it so seriously, there is no room for ironic high jinks.

Piano Concerto #3 (1973) is his most sophisticated. It uses thirty-three variations on a theme (perversely unstated until the end). Sometimes Shchedrin plays eerie night music, other times it's high-pitched white-key tones. Meanwhile, the orchestra rumbles, as if the musicians are champing at the bit, but Shchedrin won't let them loose. Not as bumptious as the second, the concerto is so aleatory, it seem as if the piano and orchestra aren't working together. But they are. In the pensive final movement, the orchestra disappears until the coda, inexplicably puncturing the silence with symbol chords played diminuendo. This CD's a cornucopia of wild fun. ---Peter Bates, classical.net

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1 Act One I. The Winter Palace 03:24
2 Act One II. Ataman Platov’s Story 02:55
3 Act One III. Inspection of the Armoury (Terzetto 05:46
4 Act One IV. The River Tulitsa (dissolve) 03:05
5 Act One V. Buckingham Parlace. Orchestral Interlude I 00:58
6 Act One VI. The Royal Presentation 04:00
7 Act One VII. Seven Turns of the Key. Orchestral Interlude II 00:41
8 Act One VIII. The Flea 02:07
9 Act One IX. Arioso of Alexander I and Scena 04:33
10 Act One X. Again in the Winter Palace (during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I) 03:00
11 Act One XI. A village in Tula and the Left-Hander’s Rude Songs 03:20
12 Act One XII. Ataman Platov Arrives in Tula 04:43
13 Act One XIII. The Russians Refashion in the English Flea (Choral Interlude) 03:47
14 Act One XIV. Ataman Platov returns to Tula 03:56
15 Act One XV. The Journey from Tula to St Petersburg Orchestral Interlude III 01:42
16 Act One XVI. Ataman Platov and the Left-Hander Arrive at the Winter Palace 03:43
17 Act One XVII. The Microscope is brought in. Orchestral Interlude IV 00:48
18 Act One XVIII. The English Flea subjected to Russian Modification 02:12
19 Act One XIX. Finale 04:33

1 Act Two I. The Left-Hander and the Flea at Buckingham Palace 01:07
2 Act Two II. The Russified Flea 02:12
3 Act Two III. Delighted English Question the Left-Hander 07:15
4 Act Two IV. The English Brides (Love Canzonets) 04:02
5 Act Two V. Attempts at Persuasion (Recitative and Ensemble) 04:05
6 Act Two VI. Know How. Orchestral Interlude V 01:47
7 Act Two VII. How to Clean your Musket 03:14
8 Act Two VIII. A Vision of Russia 03:10
9 Act Two IX. The Left-Hander Sets Sail for Russia 07:35
10 Act Two X. The Storm. Orchestral Interlude VI 02:17
11 Act Two XI. Return to St Petersburg 04:01
12 Act Two XII. Final Scenes (Ordeal in the Infirmaries) 09:30
13 Act Two XIII. Epilogue 09:58

Andrei Popov - The Left-Hander
Edward Tsanga - Ataman Platov
Vladimir Moroz - Alexander I / Nicholas I
Kristina Alieva - The Flea
Maria Maksakova - Princess Charlotte
Mariinsky Orchestra & Chorus
Valery Gergiev – conductor

Specially written for Gergiev on the occasion of his 60th birthday, Rodion Shchedrin’s The Left-Hander is a comedy of Russians and Englishmen, new technology, old traditions, and strong drink. The premiere was given by the Mariinsky Opera in St Petersburg in July 2013.

Rodion Shchedrin is one of music’s greatest living humourists, and his work is laced with pitch-black irony and deadpan wit. Based on Nikolai Leskov’s classical satirical novella of 1881, The Tale of Cross-Eyed Lefty From Tula and the Steel Flea, The Left-Hander is a gloriously wry exploration of Russia’s relationship with the West in general and England in particular. --- mariinskylabel.com

Nikolay Leskov is probably best known to English readers, certainly to English music lovers, as the author of The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the basis of Shostakovich’s opera; but Russians would probably single out Levsha (‘The Left-hander’), in full The Tale of the Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea. Essentially it is a satirical fantasy mocking both Russian and Western attitudes, with the brilliant Russian smith given the task of improving upon a mechanical flea almost too small to be seen so that a Russian deputation to the Court of St James can persuade the Brits of Russian technical superiority, while neglecting and even despising the clever craftsman. As Shchedrin puts it, a typical feature of the Russian national character: ‘Innovative talent, resourcefulness…the eternal theme of power and the common man, the lack of demand for genius in the homeland.’ Superfluous men, yet again.

There are indeed resonances here down the length of Russian history, and Shchedrin goes for his opportunities. Some are fairly straightforward: there is a brash send-up of the pomposity of Buckingham Palace but plenty of Slav nostalgia with folk instruments and, ironically, unaccompanied choral singing from the splendid Mariinsky Chorus mourning the inventor wholeheartedly – once he is safely dead. But the ironies are many-layered; and though these may seem to invite music, Shchedrin is sometimes defeated by them. He has much of the manner of Shostakovich at his most Gogol-like, and can hardly be blamed for not having quite such an individual acuteness of invention.

Valery Gergiev conducts a sharp performance, one fully alert to the satires that enmesh the work. The Flea itself is depicted by a nimble coloratura, Kristina Alieva, and its maker – something of a yurodivy, Russia’s enduring Holy Fool – is affectingly sung by Andrey Popov. Vladimir Moroz sings eloquently as both Tsars, Alexander I and Nicholas I, strongly supported by Edward Tsanga as the Ataman (Commander) Platov, though Maria Maksakova goes rather over the top as Princess Charlotte. There is a hefty drinking contest in an impressive storm involving Andrei Spekhov as an English Under-Skipper belting out our national anthem in rivalry with the Left-Hander. The booklet has parallel Russian/English translations, with short (too short) essays also in French and German. --- John Warrack, gramophone.co.uk

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1. Carmen Suite after Bizet's Opera - 1. IntroductionRussian National Orchestra 1:47
2. Carmen Suite after Bizet's Opera - 2. DanceMikhail Pletnev 2:19
3. Carmen Suite after Bizet's Opera - 3. First IntermezzoMikhail Pletnev 1:05
4. Carmen Suite after Bizet's Opera - 4. Changing of the GuardMikhail Pletnev 1:57
5. Carmen Suite after Bizet's Opera - 5. Carmen's Entrance and HabaneraMikhail Pletnev 3:10
6. Carmen Suite after Bizet's Opera - 6. SceneRussian National Orchestra 5:45
7. Carmen Suite after Bizet's Opera - 7. Second IntermezzoRussian National Orchestra 2:02
8. Carmen Suite after Bizet's Opera - 8. BoleroRussian National Orchestra 1:08
9. Carmen Suite after Bizet's Opera - 9. ToreroMikhail Pletnev 2:44
10. Carmen Suite after Bizet's Opera - 10.Torero and CarmenMikhail Pletnev 4:27
11. Carmen Suite after Bizet's Opera - 11.AdagioRussian National Orchestra 5:47
12. Carmen Suite after Bizet's Opera - 12.Fortune-TellingRussian National Orchestra 4:31
13. Carmen Suite after Bizet's Opera - 13.FinaleRussian National Orchestra 6:18
14. Concerto for Orchestra No.1 "Naughty Limericks"Mikhail Pletnev 8:17
15. Concerto for Orchestra No.2 "The Chimes"Russian National Orchestra10:30

Russian National Orchestra
Mikhail Pletnev - conductor

Rodion Shchedrin...probably not the most commercial composer the Big Yellow Label could throw at us right now, but their instincts on contemporary music have been so sound over the last couple of years we'd better have a look. There are two very obvious selling points: Shchedrin's Carmen Suite after Bizet, so you get all the familiar tunes dressed up in a way Bizet would never have imagined, and with a sly grin and a twinkle in the eye. Definitely not to be taken too seriously, especially with all the percussion and special effects from the strings. The Carmen Suite came into existence in a rather roundabout fashion. Shchedrin was asked for a new Carmen ballet, but found it was impossible to think of the story without Bizet's famous tunes going through his head...so in the end he gave in and decided to exploit the original opera: "a creative meeting of minds" he calls it. But this was the Soviet Union in the late 60's, and after the first performance it was banned by the authorities as "insulting to Bizet's masterpiece". It took Shostakovich's intervention to get the ballet back on the approved list, and it's become Shchedrin's best-known work.

So what's the other selling point? The Russian National Orchestra and Mikhail Pletnev; if you wanted to convince someone to take a punt on Shchedrin's music, you couldn't do much better than them. And anyone taking the risk will receive possibly unexpected rewards; the Carmen Suite is the easy sell, but I reckon it's the sound of Shchedrin's two Concertos for Orchestra that'll be spinning round your ears long after the cd's stopped - the jazzy brilliance of Naughty Limericks (not quite an accurate translation of the Russian title, but the booklet explains it well), and the impressive soundscape of The Chimes, a direct successor to Rachmaninov's The Bells. That, by the way, was the last thing Pletnev's Russians recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, so there's an obvious logic to recording The Chimes, and a pretty good excuse to check it out. --John Armstrong

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Concerto No.2 for Piano and Orchestra 
1. Dialogs. Tempo rubato
2. Improvisaton. Allegro
3. Contrasts. Andante

Anna Karenina - Romantic Music for Large Symphony Orchestra
4. Anna Karenina
- Bad omen
- Anna’s love
- Anna’s lies
- Anna’s rebellion
- Anna’s dreams
- Anna’s death

Rodion Schedrin - piano
USSR Academic Symphony Orchestra
Yevgeni Svetlanov - conductor

In Piano Concerto #2 (1966), Shchedrin turns chameleon. No longer a sentimentalist, he peppers the meal with dissonance. Mixing twelve-tone compositional techniques with traditional ones (like recapitulation and development), this piece dives and thrashes about, never losing its backbone of Shchedrin showmanship. Don't play it before going to sleep. The piano shakes the orchestra as if trying to wake it up. The orchestra snarls and squirms and – it's all great fun. In the final movement, Shchedrin seems to imitate Shostakovich during the Andante and inserts a jazzy, American-style xylophone passage during the Allegro. --- classical.net

Since Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, the authors of ballets, particularly in Russia, have not been afraid to translate great literary subjects into dance. Tolstoy's novel is another story of forbidden and doomed love: the married Anna loses everything because of her adulterous love in this tragic classic. Shchedrin, a fine composer, became a composer of ballets because of his marriage to Maya Plisetskaya, a prima ballerina for the Bolshoi. This sweeping, romantic score was written for her to portray the most touching heroine in all of Russian literature. The music darkens and becomes more dissonantly oppressive as Anna becomes more and more hopelessly trapped by her situation. It ends starkly with a tour de force of orchestration, as Shchedrin manages the most naturalistic and authentic-sounding railroad engine imitation in all of music: This train strikes Anna with a sound of almost brutal ugliness, and the train sounds recede with an indifferent mechanical soullessness which reflects how Anna has been abandoned by society. This is excellent score, in a style best described as "post-Prokofiev"; its 1972 premiere in Moscow was one of the grand musical events of the later Soviet era. There are also echoes of Tchaikovsky, the preeminent Russian ballet composer. "Although I borrowed some elements from the music of Tchaikovsky," Shchedrin has stated, "it was never my intention to fully retain its style or resort to a mere compilation. The subject of the novel, its essence and heart of the conflict are understandable to our contemporaries. What I undertook, therefore, was to synthesize the external characteristics of the times -- the costumes, manners and intonations -- with a modern viewpoint of Tolstoy's novel." --- Joseph Stevenson, Rovi

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1. Dama s sobatchkoi (The Lady with a Lapdog) 		47:49
-Yalta
-Moscow
-Town S.

USSR Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra
Alexander Lazarev – conductor

Shchedrin's "The Lady with a Lapdog" was written in 1985 as a ballet for his wife, the famous Russian ballerina and choreographer Maya Plisetskaya, which she not only choreographed but danced at the Bolshoi: she was 60 then. It is after a famous short novel by Chekhov, which I took the occasion to read. In typical Chekhov manner, it is about not much, a mismarried man and womaniser who meets and woos a (younger) mismarried woman while both are on an escape trip from their respective spouse in Yalta. She succumbs, they both believe it is only a passing adventure (it is her first), he goes back to Moscow and she to whatever far-off provincial town near Petersburg she lives in, he can't take his mind off of her, after months of agonizing he sets off to meet her, they make up together again, meeting clandestinely in Moscow, and the story just ends there, letting you down kind of in the middle of nowhere. The bitter-sweet atmospheres of Chekhov are a special taste. Maybe it takes more vodka than I can ingest and frost than I get here.

Anyway, Shchedrin's score can be heard not as a ballet and with no reference to its very thin plot - the fact that the CD is NOT cued doesn't help, and quite frankly I have not been able (nor have I tried very hard) to spot where the four next duets/pas de deux begin (the ballet is made up of five) - but rather as "pure" orchestral music.

Heard as such it affords many pleasures. Shchedrin's language is NOT avant-garde. In fact, before reading the liner notes, I had thought it was an early work of his. Those who know Khachaturian's Adagio from his Gayaneh's Ballet (it is the music that Kubrik used in "2001, a Space Odyssey", at the beginning of the part 3, "Jupiter Mission: Eighteen Months Later", aboard spaceship Discovery One) will know what to expect: mournful, burdened, intensely lyrical. Only in a few spots (at 19:25, 30:00, or again 36:00) does the language become more contemporary, anguished and dissonant - but it is mainstream and none-too radical contemporary from the 60s and 70s. Late- rather than early-Penderecki, if you will.

Also, a nice touch is that the scoring is almost for strings alone. Shchedrin only adds the discreet touches of color from two oboes (entering first at 5:02, in a more dance-like and playful mood - bet the two lovers-to-be have just met - soon submerged by an agitated surge from the strings), mournful cor anglais (7:48), crystalline and enigmatic celesta souding like some music box (15:40 - or is it glockenspiel? The liner notes don't even mention it), two French horns (27:15). It ends with the eerie sound of violins playing flageolet-like (harmonics). It would make good film music.

The shortish TT of 47:51 is a drawback, and the price now demanded for this disc - a Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab from the early days of the CD - is definitely another one. Note that it has been reissued by BMG/Melodiya with a filler - but that too is now gone; as I write you can find it under twenty, but I bet it won't be for long (Shchedrin: Lady With the Lapdog, Self Po). If you want it cheap, I see that it has been also reissued on the Zyx label, with no filler(Rodion Shchedrin: The Lady with a Lapdog - and someone has uploaded a photo of cover which is obviously the wrong one). --- Discophage, amazon.com

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1.Concerto for Orchestra No. 3, "The Old Music of Russian Provincial Circuses" 	24:16 	
2.Symphony No. 2, "25 prelyudiy": I. Preludes 1-6		11:27 	
3.Symphony No. 2, "25 prelyudiy": II. Preludes 7-9		5:55 	
4.Symphony No. 2, "25 prelyudiy": III. Preludes 10-14		11:43 	
5.Symphony No. 2, "25 prelyudiy": IV. Preludes 15-18		9:28 	
6.Symphony No. 2, "25 prelyudiy": V. Preludes 19-25		16:53

BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Vassily Sinaisky – conductor

Contemporary composers [prefer] to write slow, gloomy, doleful music as if it were the confession of a suicide before he takes his life...’ Not Rodion Shchedrin, best known for his witty reworking of Bizet’s Carmen as a ballet score. And there’s more in that vein in the more recent of the two works on this disc. Old Russian Circus Music, written in 1989 for the Chicago Symphony, is a kind of modern retake of Stravinsky’s Circus Polka with the musical humour laid on with a trowel. The Second Symphony, though, is seriously earnest, composed in the mid-Sixties and censured by the Soviet Union of Composers after its Moscow premiere for its uncompromisingly confrontational stance – it certainly sounds daringly modernist for its time and place. The BBC Philharmonic fares better in the Circus Music than in the Symphony, which witnesses the occasional passage of knife-edge string playing. But the players are old hands at making something memorable of unfamiliar music and there is, throughout, the sense of welcome discovery, with Sinaisky an enthusiastic and dutiful guide.---Matthew Rye, classical-music.com

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