SHOSTAKOVICH: Michelangelo Suite - Romances [CD de audio] Anatoli Kotscherga, Anatoli Babykin, Wladimir Kasatchuk, WDR Sinfonieo

By the time Shostakovich came to write his last and, ultimately, longest song cycle in 1974, he was mortally ill with the heart disease that would kill him the following year. His thought and music, from which death had never been far, had turned inescapably to the impermanence and shortcomings of the human condition, expressed with the bitterest eloquence in Symphony No. 14 in song cycle style, which through Lorca and Rilke's adjustments it even suggests the welcome liberation from suicide. The illness had reduced his movement to a minimum, so the last two symphonies, the last quartets and this song cycle are written with a great and imposed economy of means, in which great forces can be used but with a postmodernist economy. , pointillist. The poems the composer selected from recent Russian translations of the poet by Avram Efros deal with the great themes: truth, love, separation, anger, creativity, death and immortality, in which threads of instrumental melody meditate semi-abstractly in the low voice of the poet as he declaims what it is to wait and then lose hope, all the more powerful for his expressive neutrality. Along with Peter Maxwell Davies's Black Pentecost and Simon Bainbridge's Ad Ora Inc erta, the cycle is one of the great responses to Das Lied von der Erde, in which Mahler's reflections on friendship and loneliness are answered with a relentless clarity, and hindsight of the global horrors that have come between them.