[Mandryka]

This is . . . one that many of the more committed Shostakovich listeners here tend to dismiss.

Why is that?

 

[Mandryka]

I like the 14th a lot, but have difficulty envisioning it as a symphony in the way I can with Das Lied von der Erde or DSCH's own 13th. Because it consists of relatively short passages it feels like it has more in common with the orchestral versions of the later song cycles (Six Poems by Marina Tsevayeva op.143a and Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti op.145a), not least because the themes of death, despair and resignation seem to run through them all.

That's interesting. It makes me think that I really don't know what a symphony is.

 

[Mandryka]

A dark, crazed narrative driven symphony, which I always enjoy playing alongside B.A. Zimmermann’s Ekklesiastische Aktion - Ich wandte mich um und sah alles Unrecht das geschah unter der Sonne - for some reason.

Galina Vishnevskaya is absolutely off her rocker…

The Zimmermann is too hard for me without the text in a language I understand, it just ends up sounding like someone shouting in a foreign language, though I can tell it’s not uninteresting music. Do you know if the CD has a translation into English or French? It may be one of these things which is inaccessible really without a spontaneous grasp of the meaning.