Classical

MICAHAEL DERVANreviews the classical pieces of the week

Shostakovich: Symphonies 5 & 9

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko

Naxos 8.572167 ****

Shostakovich's Fifth (1937) and Ninth (1945) symphonies affected the composer's career in very different ways. The Fifth functioned as a public reconciliation between Shostakovich and the Soviet state, after the disruption of the notorious Pravda attack on his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The Ninth failed to provide the expected victory celebration, and fell foul of Zhdanov's cultural bullying. Vasily Petrenko approaches both works with an unusual kind of patience, emphasising the grave qualities of the Fifth and taking a straight-faced route through the potentially frivolous Ninth in a way that provides anchorage while also indulging its wit. With fine playing from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, these are anything but everyday performances. www.naxosdirect.ie

Stockhausen: Kontra-Punkte; Refrain; Zeitmasze; Schlagtrio

Ensemble Recherche

Wergo WER 67171 ***

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was a hot young blood of the avant-garde when, between 1952 and 1959, he wrote the four chamber works collected here. They're strikingly varied in instrumentation, as well as hugely diverse in their preoccupations. The Schlagtrio(Percussion Trio, 1952) for piano and timpani is the driest and most abstract-sounding of the four. Refrain(1959) for piano, celesta and percussion is unusually slow, taking life from the process of sonic decay, and including strange vocalisations along with the instrumental sounds. The altogether better-known Kontra-Punkte(1952-3) for 10 instruments, and Zeitmasze(1955-56) for five woodwinds make less of an impression in the diligent performances by Germany's Ensemble Recherche. www.tinyurl.com/lorgve

Piano Trios by Chopin Dvorak, Ravel, Smetana

David Oistrakh (violin), Sviatoslav Knushevitky (cello), Lev Oborin (piano) DG Original Masters

477 8537 (2 CDs) ***

These 1950s recordings are old-fashioned in positive and negative ways. There's the big-hearted naturalness of the playing, with the music just streaming out of the great David Oistrakh's violin, as if he were releasing an unstoppable force of nature. But the recording engineers responded to Oistrakh's star status by giving him a prominence and clarity in the sound picture that are denied to the other musicians – a strange state of affairs in the Chopin and Ravel trios, with their huge piano parts. The good news is that Oistrakh easily bears such close scrutiny, and the balance doesn't manage to hold back Knushevitsky's playing of the gorgeous cello part in Dvorak's DumkyTrio. www.tinyurl.com/5b9s4r

Music for two pianos by Debussey and Ravel

Vladimar Ashkenazy, Vovka Ashkenazy (pianos)

Decca 478 1090 ***

Debussy and Ravel seem to be inextricably intertwined in the minds of music programmers. Here the father-and-son team of Vladimir and Vovka Ashkenazy offer original works and arrangements for two pianos, but steer clear of those pieces by Debussy that Ravel chose to arrange. Technically they make a great team, and provide sharply etched pictures in the major original work, Debussy's late En blanc et noir, music inhabited by the ghosts and rumblings of war. But there's less than three minutes of original Ravel (Entre cloches) and the big-scale arrangements (Debussy's Jeux by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, and Ravel's two-piano versions of his own Rapsodie espagnoleand La Valse) lack flexibility and spring. www.deccaclassics.com