Wigglesworth/NRPO/BIS Shostakovich Babi Yar SACD

[John Kim]

After reading David Hurwitz's enthusiastic review on classicstoday.com, I decided to venture with Mark Wigglesworth's 'Babi Yar'. Simply put, this is a stunning recording of Shostakovich's monumental, profoundly human and touching tribute to the suffering and massacre of Jews in Russia. As much as I admire Jansons's EMI and Haitink's Decca recordings I now prefer Wigglesworth's conducting which strides with a keen sense of structure, a better balance and tempos overall. Netherlands Radio Phil. Orchestra plays with awesome power and technical virtuosity that equal Bavarian Radio S.O featured in the EMI recording. If bass Jan-Hendrik Rootering's voice doesn't quite match with Sergei Aleksashkin's emotional depth and his Russian diction, he still displays a great sympathy for the texture. The opening movt. - the only part that's actually based on the poem Babi Yar - has truly shattering climaxes that will push any orchestra beyond its limit and NRPO rises to the challenge extremely well. But the music's ultimate point and strength lie in the last three movements where the composer plumbs into despair and fear like he had never done before, and we get a sense of elegiac relief in the final pages; here the music enters Nth dimensional world of eternal peace and tranquility, a familiar territory that Shostakovich explored previously in his massive Symphony No. 4 and 8, and later revisited in his last symphony. These are great, amazingly poignant moments that are in the same class as Mahler's Symphony No. 6, No. 9, and Das Lied von der Erde. Life-changing music? Yes, definitely.

The sound in the SACD layer is the most spectacular I've ever heard of any Shostakovich recording. As usual with most of recordings available on this label,  the sonic image is authentic with a very wide dynamic range but it is also loaded with plenty of ambience and warmth. The upper and lower ends open up quite a bit whenever the music calls for (listen to the major climaxes in I., III., and IV.) while the quiet passages register with startling presence thanks to the vivid engineering that tends to capture all the details however minute they may be.

Highest recommendation.

Thanks, Dave  .

John,