Andris Nelsons, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra - Shostakovich: Symphony No 8 (2012)

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Andris Nelsons, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra - Shostakovich: Symphony No 8 (2012)

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Andris Nelsons is one of the most sought-after young conductors on the international scene today and once again served notice of his extraordinary talent in Summer 2011 when he conducted two concerts with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam at the prestigious Lucerne Festival.

Composer: Dmitri Shostakovich, Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss
Conductor: Andris Nelsons
Orchestra/Ensemble: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Reviews: Andris Nelsons has generated a considerable buzz and this video gives those who haven’t encountered his work before an idea of what all the shouting’s about. Nelsons has conducted at Bayreuth and is currently music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, a post held for a long stretch by a certain frizzy-haired Brit who has since gone on to find steady work in Berlin. The young Latvian conductor—formerly an orchestral trumpet player and a longtime conducting student of Mariss Jansons—looks really happy to be on stage at Lucerne, like a 10-year-old boy who has been invited into the dugout of his favorite professional baseball team. And why shouldn’t he? At 33, he’s conducting the Concertgebouw at one of the world’s most prestigious music festivals.


This Blu-ray presents Nelsons’s complete program of September 4, 2011. He leads off with the Rienzi Overture, opting for deliberate tempos for both the slower and faster sections, which works very well; you’ll not hear a more soulful rendering of the overture’s principal theme. Next follows an effective version of Salome’s Dance ; Nelsons gets credit for good pacing, though the success of this piece depends as well on brilliant orchestral playing, definitely not in short supply here.


In the Shostakovich symphony, the main event, Nelsons is a little overparted. As with the Wagner and Strauss selections, the young conductor uses a score, which doesn’t necessarily reflect any insecurity or a lack of familiarity with the music, but he does seem to be following the printed page pretty closely at times. The lengthy first movement doesn’t gel as well as it does in more experienced hands, in the sense of presenting a coherent narrative structure. Likewise, the second-movement Allegretto is missing the ultimate degree of pithy irony, what the notes correctly refer to as “the ambiguous, false-bottomed nature of a work that conceals beneath its surface the idea of an individual trampled underfoot by uncontrolled brutality and despotism.” I’ve heard numerous versions of III that are more savage and harrowing, including Bernard Haitink’s early 1980s version with the same orchestra, part of the very first complete Shostakovich symphony cycle. It’s with the final two movements that this still-developing musician best reveals his potential. Nelsons sustains a level of tension throughout the Largo, exploiting the potential for cumulative expressive power that derives from that movement’s passacaglia form. With the transition into the tentative sunlight of the Finale, it’s abundantly clear that Nelsons “gets” Shostakovich’s message about the futility of war and the composer’s deep questioning of what was accomplished by all the carnage he’d just witnessed.


The entire concert is very effectively filmed by a director (Ute Feudel) who obviously understands the construction and meaning of the music, and the visuals are stunning. Close-ups of individual players are very involving—the extended bass clarinet passage in the last movement, or the cello solo that follows shortly thereafter. The high-resolution audio isn’t exceptional. It’s tonally appealing but a little closed-in; even surround-sound playback fails to give as much of a sense of the hall as is heard with Abbado’s Mahler recordings from the same venue.

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Andris Nelsons, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra - Shostakovich: Symphony No 8 (2012)

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